which has been made into a
guard-house, with battlements and frescoes and heraldic devices in
gold and colours, and a man-at-arms carved in stone standing life-size
in his niche and bearing his date 1530. A little farther on, but close
at hand, is a cloister with beautiful marble columns and tombs, and a
colossal wood-carved Calvary, and beside that a small and very rich
chapel: indeed, so full is the little town of the undisturbed past,
that to walk in it is like opening a missal of the Middle Ages, all
emblazoned and illuminated with saints and warriors, and it is so
clean, and so still, and so noble, by reason of its monuments and its
historic colour, that I marvel much no one has ever cared to sing its
praises. The old pious heroic life of an age at once more restful and
more brave than ours still leaves its spirit there, and then there is
the girdle of the mountains all around, and that alone means strength,
peace, majesty.

In this little town a few years ago August Strehla lived with his
people in the stone-paved irregular square where the grand church
stands.

He was a small boy of nine years at that time--a chubby-faced little
man with rosy cheeks, big hazel eyes, and clusters of curls the brown
of ripe nuts. His mother was dead, his father was poor, and there were
many mouths at home to feed. In this country the winters are long and
very cold, the whole land lies wrapped in snow for many months, and
this night that he was trotting home, with a jug of beer in his numb
red hands, was terribly cold and dreary. The good burghers of Hall had
shut their double shutters, and the few lamps there were flickered
dully behind their quaint, old-fashioned iron casings. The mountains
indeed were beautiful, all snow-white under the stars that are so big
in frost. Hardly anyone was astir; a few good souls wending home from
vespers, a tired post-boy who blew a shrill blast from his tasseled
horn as he pulled up his sledge before a hostelry, and little August
hugging his jug of beer to his ragged sheepskin coat, were all who
were abroad, for the snow fell heavily and the good folks of Hall go
early to their beds. He could not run, or he would have spilled the
beer; he was half frozen and a little frightened, but he kept up his
courage by saying over and over again to himself, "I shall soon be at
home with dear Hirschvogel."

He went on through the streets, past the stone man-at-arms of the
guard-house, and so into the plac