harming Old-World places that I know, and August for his part
did not know any other. It has the green meadows and the great
mountains all about it, and the gray-green glacier-fed water
rushes by it. It has paved streets and enchanting little shops
that have all latticed panes and iron gratings to them; it has a
very grand old Gothic church, that has the noblest blendings of
light and shadow, and marble tombs of dead knights, and a look of
infinite strength and repose as a church should have. Then there
is the Muntze Tower, black and white, rising out of greenery and
looking down on a long wooden bridge and the broad rapid river;
and there is an old schloss which has been made into a guard-house,
with battlements and frescos and heraldic devices in gold and
colors, and a man-at-arms carved in stone standing life-size in
his niche and bearing his date 1530. A little farther on, but
close at hand, is a cloister with beautiful marble columns and
tombs, and a colossal wood-carved Calvary, and beside that a
small and very rich chapel: indeed, so full is the little town of
the undisturbed past, that to walk in it is like opening a missal
of the Middle Ages, all emblazoned and illuminated with saints
and warriors, and it is so clean, and so still, and so noble, by
reason of its monuments and its historic color, that I marvel
much no one has ever cared to sing its praises. The old pious
heroic life of an age at once more restful and more brave than
ours still leaves its spirit there, and then there is the girdle
of the mountains all around, and that alone means strength,
peace, majesty.

In this little town a few years ago August Strehla lived with his
people in the stone-paved irregular square where the grand church
stands.

He was a small boy of nine years at that time,--a chubby-faced
little man with rosy cheeks, big hazel eyes, and clusters of
curls the brown of ripe nuts. His mother was dead, his father was
poor, and there were many mouths at home to feed. In this country
the winters are long and very cold, the whole land lies wrapped
in snow for many months, and this night that he was trotting
home, with a jug of beer in his numb red hands, was terribly
cold and dreary. The good burghers of Hall had shut their double
shutters, and the few lamps there were flickered dully behind
their quaint, old-fashioned iron casings. The mountains indeed
were beautiful, all snow-white under the stars that are so big in
frost. Hardl