way from
Steiermark, were received with a hearty welcome and krapfen; and the
wandering family, who were not at all respectable, but were treated
with some distrust and more commiseration--the traveling tinker,
his dark-eyed, dark-skinned wife and saucy, grimy children, who were
barred and bolted with their barrow, their rags and their kettles in
the barn that night as in a traveler's rest--ate with marvelous relish
their bountiful-gleanings of this great krapfen harvest.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XII.

Cold rain and mist have now set in. The landscape, which has from the
first possessed a peculiar charm for us, is often blotted from view.
The varied, undivided yet most individual range of dolomites which
rises on the edge of the eastern horizon, instead of melting under
the soft influences of warm sunshine and quivering air into glowing
crimson, purple, palpitating mountains--which only with advancing
night turn into gray, motionless pinnacles and battlements of the
great dolomitic land that stretches beyond--now remain, whenever
visible, cold, hard masses of snow, like rigid nuns of some ascetic
order.

It is time to be gone. And Fanni, the sturdy, devoted attendant
specially engaged to wait upon us during the last season, is wild to
accompany us to Italy--comfortable Italy, where the washing water
does not freeze in winter, and where maize _polenta_ is as cheap and
plentiful as the brown buckwheat _plenten_ of Tyrol. She has a good
stock of clothes: she wants no wages, only her journey paid. Surely we
will take her? We give her no hopes, merely promising that if we come
another year and she be then out of place, we will gladly employ her.
This is a drop of comfort, and she rushes down stairs to convey at
least this bit of good news to Kathi.

A few minutes later we find the two women, joined by Moidel, standing;
against the cellar door, which is kept closely shut, that the smell
emitted by a vat of sauerkraut may not offend the fastidious nostrils
of the gentry. Kathi has a sprig of rosemary behind her ear, and her
bare arms wrapped up in her blue apron, always in her case a sign of
ease and relaxation. She is saying, "Ja, ja, very worrying. Such side
ways to get hold of the place!"

"And Munichers too!" adds Moidel--"so pushing, so clamorous!"

The sight of some brown veils and gentlemen's hats above the garden
wall leads to the following explanation from Fanni: "Herr Je, just