ith the cross-crowned Kofel for
their chief, like stern, strong sentinels guarding its old-world peace
from the din and clamour of the outer world. Describe how the square,
whitewashed houses are sheltered beneath great overhanging gables, and
are encircled by carved wooden balconies and verandahs, where, in the
cool of the evening, peasant wood-carver and peasant farmer sit to smoke
the long Bavarian pipe, and chat about the cattle and the Passion Play
and village politics; and how, in gaudy colours above the porch, are
painted glowing figures of saints and virgins and such-like good folk,
which the rains have sadly mutilated, so that a legless angel on one side
of the road looks dejectedly across at a headless Madonna on the other,
while at an exposed corner some unfortunate saint, more cruelly dealt
with by the weather than he ever was even by the heathen, has been
deprived of everything that he could call his own, with the exception of
half a head and a pair of extra-sized feet.

"Explain how all the houses are numbered according to the date they were
built, so that number sixteen comes next to number forty-seven, and there
is no number one because it has been pulled down. Tell how
unsophisticated visitors, informed that their lodgings are at number
fifty-three, go wandering for days and days round fifty-two, under the
not unreasonable impression that their house must be next door, though,
as a matter of fact, it is half a mile off at the other end of the
village, and are discovered one sunny morning, sitting on the doorstep of
number eighteen, singing pathetic snatches of nursery rhymes, and trying
to plat their toes into door-mats, and are taken up and carried away
screaming, to end their lives in the madhouse at Munich.

"Talk about the weather. People who have stayed here for any length of
time tell me that it rains at Ober-Ammergau three days out of every four,
the reason that it does not rain on the fourth day being that every
fourth day is set apart for a deluge. They tell me, also, that while it
will be pouring with rain just in the village the sun will be shining
brightly all round about, and that the villagers, when the water begins
to come in through their roofs, snatch up their children and hurry off to
the nearest field, where they sit and wait until the storm is over."

"Do you believe them--the persons that you say tell you these tales?" I
ask.

"Personally I do not," he replies. "I think peop