e air, and supported it there, like a column supporting a shed.
Ten thousand toadstools, with the right purchase, could lift a man, I
suppose. But what good would it do?

All our afternoon's progress had been uphill. About five or half past we
reached the summit, and all of a sudden the dense curtain of the forest
parted and we looked down into a deep and beautiful gorge and out over a
wide panorama of wooded mountains with their summits shining in the sun
and their glade-furrowed sides dimmed with purple shade. The gorge under
our feet--called Allerheiligen--afforded room in the grassy level at its
head for a cozy and delightful human nest, shut away from the world and
its botherations, and consequently the monks of the old times had not
failed to spy it out; and here were the brown and comely ruins of their
church and convent to prove that priests had as fine an instinct seven
hundred years ago in ferreting out the choicest nooks and corners in a
land as priests have today.

A big hotel crowds the ruins a little, now, and drives a brisk trade
with summer tourists. We descended into the gorge and had a supper which
would have been very satisfactory if the trout had not been boiled.
The Germans are pretty sure to boil a trout or anything else if left to
their own devices. This is an argument of some value in support of the
theory that they were the original colonists of the wild islands of the
coast of Scotland. A schooner laden with oranges was wrecked upon one
of those islands a few years ago, and the gentle savages rendered the
captain such willing assistance that he gave them as many oranges as
they wanted. Next day he asked them how they liked them. They shook
their heads and said:

"Baked, they were tough; and even boiled, they warn't things for a
hungry man to hanker after."

We went down the glen after supper. It is beautiful--a mixture of sylvan
loveliness and craggy wildness. A limpid torrent goes whistling down
the glen, and toward the foot of it winds through a narrow cleft between
lofty precipices and hurls itself over a succession of falls. After one
passes the last of these he has a backward glimpse at the falls which
is very pleasing--they rise in a seven-stepped stairway of foamy and
glittering cascades, and make a picture which is as charming as it is
unusual.

CHAPTER XXIII

[Nicodemus Dodge and the Skeleton]

We were satisfied that we could walk to Oppenau in one day, now that
we wer