minded me of the stage-settings for "Tannhaeuser" and
"Lohengrin."

Seen from the summit of the Mendel Pass, the road from Trent to Bozen
looks like a lariat thrown carelessly upon the ground. It climbs
laboriously upward, through splendid evergreen forests, in countless
curves and spirals, loiters for a few-score yards beside the margin of a
tiny crystal lake, and then, refreshed, plunges downward, in a series of
steep white zigzags, to meet the Isarco, in whose company it enters
Bozen. Because the car, like ourselves, was thirsty, we stopped at the
summit of the pass at the tiny hamlet of Madonna di Campiglio--Our Lady
of the Fields--for water and for tea. Should you have occasion to go
that way, I hope that you will take time to stop at the unpretentious
little Hotel Neumann. It is the sort of Tyrolean inn which had, I
supposed, gone out of existence with the war. The innkeeper, a jovial,
white-whiskered fellow, such as one rarely finds off the musical comedy
stage, served us with tea--with rum in it--and hot bread with honey, and
heaping dishes of small wild strawberries, and those pastries which the
Viennese used to make in such perfection. There were five of us,
including the chauffeur and the orderly, and for the food which we
consumed I think that the innkeeper charged the equivalent of a dollar.
But, as he explained apologetically, the war had raised prices terribly.
We were the first visitors, it seemed, barring Austrians and a few
Italian officers, who had visited his inn in nearly five years. Both of
his sons had been killed in the war, he told us, fighting bravely with
their Jaeger battalion. The widow of one of his sons--I saw her; a
sweet-faced Austrian girl--with her child, had come to live with him, he
said. Yes, he was an old man, both of his boys were dead, his little
business had been wrecked, the old Emperor Franz-Joseph--yes, we could
see his picture over the fireplace within--had gone and the new Emperor
Karl was in exile, in Switzerland, life had heard; even the Empire in
which he had lived, boy and man, for seventy-odd years, had disappeared;
the whole world was, indeed, turned upside down--but, Heaven be praised,
he had a little grandson who would grow up to carry the business on.

[Illustration: A LITTLE MOTHER OF THE TYROL

We gave her some candy: it was the first taste of sugar that she had had
in four years]

[Illustration: THE END OF THE DAY

A Tyrolean peasant woman returning from th