m rarely come down to their
fellow-parishioners and in winter frequently must keep their dead until
after the snows have melted away in order to give them a burial. The
greatest personage whom the villagers get to see in the course of the
year is the priest.

[Illustration: ADALBERT STIFTER DAFFINGER]

They greatly honor him, and usually he himself through a longer
sojourn becomes so accustomed to the solitude of the valley that he not
unwillingly stays and simply lives on there. At least, it has not
happened in the memory of man that the priest of the village had been a
man hankering to get away or unworthy of his vocation.

No roads lead through the valley. People use their double-track
cart-paths upon which they bring in the products of their fields in
carts drawn by one horse. Hence, few people come into the valley, among
them sometimes a solitary pedestrian who is a lover of nature and dwells
for some little time in the upper room of the inn and admires the
mountains; or perhaps a painter who sketches the small, pointed spire of
the church and the beautiful summits of the rocky peaks. For this reason
the villagers form a world by themselves. They all know each other by
name and their several histories down from the time of grandfather and
great-grandfather; they all mourn when one of them dies; know what name
the new-born will receive; they have a language differing from that of
the plains; they have their quarrels, which they settle among
themselves; they assist one another and flock together when something
extraordinary has happened.

They are conservative and things are left to remain as they were.
Whenever a stone drops out of a wall, the same stone is put back again,
the new houses are built like the old ones, the dilapidated roofs are
repaired with the same kind of shingles, and if there happen to be
brindled cows on a farm, calves of the same color are raised always, so
that the color stays on the farm.

To the south of the village one sees a snow-mountain which seems to lift
up its shining peaks right above the roofs of the houses. Yet it is not
quite so near. Summer and winter it dominates the valley with its
beetling crags and snowy sides. Being the most remarkable object in the
landscape, this mountain is of main interest to the inhabitants and has
become the central feature of many a story.

There is not a young man or graybeard in the village but can tell of the
crags and crests of the mountain,