mental and corporeal comfort in sipping their acid
wine and smoking their cheap tobacco in company. There might not have
been any great harm in it, but nevertheless it seemed an apparent
falling away from the singularly bright example which a good man, born
only ten minutes from the Elephant, in the village of Muehlen, had once
set them.

The priest Michael Feichter, at his death in 1832 the head of the
clerical seminary at Brixen, became for a time, through his extreme
goodness and grace, the unseen regenerator of the Church in the Tyrol.
A simple, guileless man, with intense love and cheerfulness, he acted
as if God his friend were ever by his side. The entire Bible, which he
had chiefly studied on his knees, he knew literally by heart. Birds,
flowers and stones gave him subjects for stirring sermons, and his
evening conversations with his pupils were fraught with the most
beneficent consequences through his intense sympathy and the power he
unwittingly possessed of diving deep into the conscience. Sorrows were
met invariably by him with a cheerful "Dominus providebit" or "parcat
Deus." Cheating and deceit pained him greatly, and he therefore
rejoiced to become acquainted with honest Jews, conscientious
officials and religious soldiers. Thoughts of wealth and station never
troubled him. He walked like a child through the world. When unable to
wear his scholastic gown he moved about, his serene face beaming with
cheerful urbanity from under the shadow of a broad-brimmed cocked hat,
his pride and delight, as it spared him both sunshade and umbrella.
His old coat of an antique cut still bore on the under side of a flap
the dyer's mark. His waistcoat and stockings were of black knitted
wool. On festive occasions, however, he fastened to the back of
his coat collar a fluttering band denoting his doctorate. There was
something humorous in his appearance: he knew it and laughed at it,
and yet, says one of his pupils, "though we joined in the laugh, his
whole person and demeanor touched us deeply: we knew that he was not
of this world."

Was it strange that we felt a great discrepancy between the memory of
this guileless man and some of the self-indulgent priests, once his
pupils, in the upper stube?

The next day, the rain promising still to detain us prisoners, Moidel,
fearing that her important services must be missed at the Hof, bravely
defied wet and mud and tramped resolutely home. In the afternoon,
utterly tired o