then you
will see the miller kneeling beside his mill with a flood rushing down
upon it, or a peasant kneeling in his harvest-field under an inky-black
cloud, or a landlord beside his inn in flames, or a mother praying
beside her sick children; and above appears an angel, or a saint, or the
Virgin with her Child.

Read the inscriptions, too, in their quaint German. Some of them are
as humourous as the epitaphs in New England graveyards. I remember one
which ran like this:

Here lies Elias Queer,
Killed in his sixtieth year;
Scarce had he seen the light of day
When a waggon-wheel crushed his life away.

And there is another famous one which says:

Here perished the honoured and virtuous maiden,
G.V.

This tablet was erected by her only son.

But for the most part a glance at these Marterl und Taferl, which are so
frequent on all the mountain-roads of the Tyrol, will give you a strange
sense of the real pathos of human life. If you are a Catholic, you will
not refuse their request to say a prayer for the departed; if you are a
Protestant, at least it will not hurt you to say one for those who still
live and suffer and toil among such dangers.

After we had walked for four hours up the Tauernthal, we came to the
Matreier-Tauernhaus, an inn which is kept open all the year for the
shelter of travellers over the high pass that crosses the mountain-range
at this point, from north to south. There we dined. It was a bare, rude
place, but the dish of juicy trout was garnished with flowers, each fish
holding a big pansy in its mouth, and as the maid set them down before
me she wished me "a good appetite," with the hearty old-fashioned
Tyrolese courtesy which still survives in these remote valleys. It is
pleasant to travel in a land where the manners are plain and good. If
you meet a peasant on the road he says, "God greet you!" if you give
a child a couple of kreuzers he folds his hands and says, "God reward
you!" and the maid who lights you to bed says, "Goodnight, I hope you
will sleep well!"

Two hours more of walking brought us through Ausser-gschloss and
Inner-gschloss, two groups of herdsmen's huts, tenanted only in summer,
at the head of the Tauernthal. Midway between them lies a little chapel,
cut into the solid rock for shelter from the avalanches. This lofty vale
is indeed rightly named; for it is shut off from the rest of the world.
The portal is a cliff down which the stre