le exaggerate to me
because I look young and innocent, but no doubt there is a ground-work of
truth in their statements. I have myself left Ober-Ammergau under a
steady drenching rain, and found a cloudless sky the other side of the
Kofel.

"Then," he continues, "you can comment upon the hardihood of the Bavarian
peasant. How he or she walks about bare-headed and bare-footed through
the fiercest showers, and seems to find the rain only pleasantly cooling.
How, during the performance of the Passion Play, they act and sing and
stand about upon the uncovered stage without taking the slightest notice
of the downpour of water that is soaking their robes and running from
their streaming hair, to make great pools upon the boards; and how the
audience, in the cheaper, unroofed portion of the theatre, sit with equal
stoicism, watching them, no one ever dreaming even of putting up an
umbrella--or, if he does dream of doing so, experiencing a very rude
awakening from the sticks of those behind."

B. stops to relight his pipe at this point, and I hear the two ladies in
the next room fidgeting about and muttering worse than ever. It seems to
me they are listening at the door (our room and theirs are connected by a
door); I do wish that they would either get into bed again or else go
downstairs. They worry me.

"And what shall I say after I have said all that?" I ask B. when at last
he has started his pipe again.

"Oh! well, after that," he replies, "you can give the history of the
Passion Play; how it came to be played."

"Oh, but so many people have done that already," I say again.

"So much the better for you," is his reply. Having previously heard
precisely the same story from half a dozen other sources, the public will
be tempted to believe you when you repeat the account. Tell them that
during the thirty year's war a terrible plague (as if half a dozen
different armies, marching up and down their country, fighting each other
about the Lord only knows what, and living on them while doing it, was
not plague enough) swept over Bavaria, devastating each town and hamlet.
Of all the highland villages, Ober-Ammergau by means of a strictly
enforced quarantine alone kept, for a while, the black foe at bay. No
soul was allowed to leave the village; no living thing to enter it.

"But one dark night Caspar Schuchler, an inhabitant of Ober-Ammergau, who
had been working in the plague-stricken neighbouring village of
Eschenloh