wooden table and the benches which the paechter had thoughtfully
placed on the threshing-floor which formed the central division.

[Illustration: SCHLOSS TAUFERS.]

On one side of the barn a small room had been boarded off. It
contained empty milk-pans, ox-bells, old ropes and cords, together
with two chests and two pairs of men's strong leather boots.
This, Moidel suggested, should be used as joint store-room and
dressing-room. Fortunately, however, we had applied it to neither
requirement, when a singular occurrence took place which might be
classed as a ghost-story at night or an optical delusion by day. The
great barn-door quietly opened, Moidel having gone out and shut it,
and two figures--one in soiled homespun shirt and _loden_ trousers,
wooden clogs, with a little black leather skull-cap on his head and a
pipe in his mouth; the other older, in leather breeches, brown knitted
worsted jacket, and an old black silk handkerchief tied round his
neck--glided in. We could have sworn that they were Jakob and the old
senner Franz, but no response came to our exclamation of recognition,
and in a second they had vanished into the said little room, where all
remained, however, as silent as before. Two of us now began even to
doubt, but the other two were positive, that figures had floated
in. Ten minutes later the mystery was solved by the identical Jakob,
attended by Franz, reappearing from the chamber, not, however, in
the hard-working dress in which they had entered, but in full
Sunday array, the leather boots upon their feet and broad-brimmed,
flower-bedecked beavers in their hands. Poor Jakob! sore must
have been his perplexity when, in the hope of slinking into his
wardrobe-room unobserved, we had come open-eyed upon him in his soiled
array. At the cost of apparent rudeness, arising chiefly from shyness,
he had silently disappeared, the old servant following his example.
Now, however, they could both freely welcome us to the Olm, expressing
the pleasure it would give them to accompany us to the senner huts on
their return with Moidel at ten o'clock from church.

This was Jakob's first introduction to Frau Anna and E----. He eyed
them closely and silently for some minutes; then said, "I like them:
they look good!" and so they went to mass.

The barn and chalet called Eder formed part of the Hofbauer's lower
Alp, where a little later in the season the cattle were brought down
for several weeks of pasturage before th