Chapter 7 No.7

Dear People,-I couldn't give you a better illustration of what happens to you in foreign countries when you pin your faith on people who are said to "speak English here," than by giving you the tale of how I went from Copenhagen to Lubeck. To begin with, I explained to the porter of the K?nig von Denmark Hotel, who is one of the English-speaking attachés of that very good hotel, that I wished, in going to Lubeck, to avoid water as much as possible. I endeavored to convey to him that my horror of it was in fact hydrophobic, and that I could go miles out of my way to escape it.

He understood me perfectly, he said; and he explained to me a fine route by which I was to cross island after island by rail, have only short intervals of water between, and come comfortably to Lubeck by eight in the evening, provided I would leave Copenhagen at 6.45 in the morning, which I was only too happy to do for the sake of escaping a long steamboat journey. So I arranged everything to that end; explained to the one waiter who spoke English that I must have breakfast on the table at 5.40, as I was to leave the house at 6.15. He understood perfectly, he said. (I also commissioned him to buy a pound of grapes for my lunch-basket; the relevancy of this will appear later.) I then carefully explained to the worthy old lady who had promised for a small consideration to take me to Munich, that she must be on the spot at six, with her luggage; and that she was on no account to bring anything to lift in her hands, because my own hand-luggage would be all she could well handle. Then I asked for my bill, that it might be settled the night beforehand, to have nothing on hand in the morning but to get off. This was doubly important, as the landlord had promised to change my Danish money into German money for me,-the Danish bankers having no German money. They so hate Germany that they consider it a disgrace, I believe, even to handle marks and pfennigs. The clerk, who also "speaks English," said he understood me perfectly; so I went upstairs cheerful and at ease in my mind. In half an hour my bill arrived; and I sent down by the waiter, who spoke "a leetle" English, five hundred Danish crowns to pay my bill, and have four hundred crowns returned to me in marks. Waited one hour, no money; rang, same waiter appeared.

"Where is my money?"

"Yees, it have gone out; it will soon return. He is not here."

Waited half an hour longer; rang again.

"Where is my money?"

"Yees, strachs. He shall all right, strachs."

"But I am very tired; I wish to go to bed."

"Yees, it shall be kommen."

Waited another half-hour,-it was now quarter of eleven; wrote on a bit of paper, "I have gone to bed; cannot take the money to-night. Have it ready for me at six in the morning." Rang, and gave it to the waiter, ejaculating, "Bureau;" and pointing downstairs, shut the door on him and went to bed. The last thing I heard from him, as I shut the door, was, "Strachs, strachs!" That means "Immediately;" and there is a Norwegian proverb that "when the Norwegian says 'Strachs,' he will be with you in half an hour."

At twenty-five minutes before six I was in the dining-room, bonneted, all ready; no sign or symptom of breakfast. I went to the little room beyond, where the waiters are to be found. There was the one who speaks least English. "Oh, goodness!" said I, "where is Wilhelm?" Wilhelm being the one mainstay of the establishment in the matter of English, and the one who had waited upon me during all my stay.

"Ya, ya. Wilhelm here; soon will be kommen."

"But I must have my breakfast; I leave the house in half an hour."

"Ya, ya. Wilhelm is not yet. He sleeps." And the good-natured little fellow darted off to call him. Poor Wilhelm had indeed overslept; but he appeared in a miraculously short time, got my breakfast together by bits, got the money from the clerk, and did his best to explain to me how it was that a given sum of money was at once more and less in marks than it was in kroner. I crammed it all into my pocket, and ran downstairs to find-no old lady; her "knapsack" on the driver's seat, but she herself not there. Four different people said something to me about it, and I could not understand one word they said; so I stepped into the carriage, sat down, and resigned myself to whatever was coming next. After about ten minutes she appeared, breathless, coming down the stairs of the hotel. She had mounted to my room, and, unmindful of the significant fact that the door was wide open and all my luggage gone, had been waiting there for me. This augured well for the journey! However, there was no time for misgivings; and we drove off at a tearing rate, late for the train. Suddenly I spied a most disreputable-looking parcel on the seat,-large, clumsy, done up in an old dirty calico curtain, from which a few brass rings were still hanging.

"What is that?" I exclaimed.

"Only my best gown, ma'am, and my velvet cloak. I couldn't disgrace you, ma'am."

"Disgrace me!" thought I. "I was never before disgraced by such a bundle."

"But I told you to bring nothing whatever to carry in your hands," I said; "you must put that into your knapsack. My roll and basket are all you can possibly lift."

"Oh, ma'am, it would ruin it to put it in the knapsack. I'm not a rich lady, like you, ma'am; it's all I've got: but I'd not like to disgrace you. I was out last night trying to hire a small trunk to bring; but you wouldn't believe it, ma'am, they wanted eight kroner down for the deposit for the value of it. But I'll not disgrace you, ma'am, and I'll forget nothing. I've a good head at counting. You'll see I'll not overlook anything."

"Never mind," I said; "you must wear your cloak [she had on only a little thin, clinging, black crape shawl,-the most pitiful of garments, and no more protection than a pocket-handkerchief against cold], and the dress must go into the knapsack at Lubeck. I will put it into my own roll as soon as we are in the cars."

At the station-luckily, as I thought-the ticket-seller spoke English, and replied readily to my inquiry for a ticket to Lubeck, by rail, "Yes, by Kiel." Then there came a man who wanted three kroner more because my trunk was heavy, and another who wanted a few pfennigs for having helped the first one lift it. I tried for a minute to count out the sum he had mentioned, and then I said, "Oh, good gracious, take it all!" emptying the few little coppers and tiny silver bits-which I knew must be, all told, not a quarter of a dollar-into his hand. He said something which, in my innocence, I supposed was thanks, but Brita told me afterwards that he was a "fearfully rough man, and what he said was to call me a 'damned German devil!' You see, ma'am, they all hate the Germans so, and hearing me speak English, he thought it was German. The French, too, ma'am,-they hate the Germans too. They say that Sara Bernhardt,-I dare say you've seen her, ma'am,-they say she nearly starved herself all in her travelling through Germany, because she wouldn't eat the German food."

At the train to see me off were two dear warm-hearted Danish women,-mother and daughter,-to whom I had brought a letter from friends in America. With barely time to thank them and say good-by, I and my old lady and her bundle and my own three parcels were all hustled into a carriage, the door slammed and locked, and we were off. Then I sank back and considered the situation. I had fancied that all that was necessary was to have a person who could speak,-that if I had but a tongue at my command, it would answer my purposes almost as well in another person's head as in my own. But I was fast learning my mistake. This good old woman, who had never been out of Denmark in her life, had no more idea which way to turn or what to do in a railway station than a baby. The first five minutes of our journey had shown that. She stood, bundles in hand, her bonnet falling off the back of her head, her crape shawl clinging limp to her figure; her face full of nervous uncertainty,-the very ideal of a bewildered old woman, such as one always sees at railway stations. The thought of being taken charge of, all the way from Copenhagen to Munich, by this type of elderly female, was, at the outset, awful; but very soon the comical side of it came over me so thoroughly that I began to think it would, on the whole, be more entertaining.

When she had told me the day before, as we were driving about in Copenhagen, that she had never in her life been out of Denmark, though she was sixty-four years old, I said, "Really that is a strange thing,-for you to be taking your first journey at that age."

"Oh, well, ma'am," she said, "I'm such a child of Nature that I shall enjoy it as much as if I were younger, and I've all the Danish history, ma'am, at my tongue's end, ma'am. There's nothing I can't tell you, ma'am. Though we've been very hard-working, I've always been one that was for making all I could: and I've been with my children at their lessons always,-we gave them all good schooling; and I've a volume of Danish poetry I've written, ma'am,-a volume that thick," marking off at least two inches on her finger.

"Danish?" said I. "Why did you not write it in English?"

"Well, ma'am, being raised here, the Danish tongue is more my own, much as I spoke English always till my parents died; but I'll write some in English for you, ma'am, before we part."

So I had for the third time alighted on a poet. "Birds of a feather," thought I to myself; but it really is extraordinary. Norwegian, Dane-I wonder, if I take a German maid to carry me to Oberammergau, if she also will turn out "a child of Nature" and a scribbler of verses.

The way from Copenhagen southward and westward by land is delightful. It plunges immediately into a rich farming-country, level as an Illinois prairie, and with comfortable farm-houses set in enclosures of trees, as they are there; and I presume for the same reason,-to break the force of the winds which might sweep from one end of Denmark to the other, without so much as a hillock to stay them: no fences, only hedges, and great tracts without even a hedge, marked off and divided by differing colors from the different crops. The second crop of clover was in full flower; acres of wheat or barley, just being sheaved; wagons piled full, rolling down shaded roads with long lines of trees on each side. Roeskilde, Ringsted, Soro,-three towns, but seemingly only one great farm, for seventeen miles out of Copenhagen. Then we began to smell the salt water, and to get a fresh breeze in at the windows; and presently we came to Kos?r, where we were to take boat. A big man in uniform stood at the door of the station, looked at our tickets, said "Kiel," and waved his hand toward a little steamer lying at the dock.

"They say they fear it will be rough, ma'am, as the wind is from the southeast," said the old lady.

"Oh, well," said I, "it is only an hour and a half across. We cross the Big Belt to Nyborg."

She accepted my statement as confidingly as a child, and we made ourselves comfortable on the upper deck. It was half-past nine o'clock. I took out my guide-book and studied up the descriptions of the different towns we were to pass through after our next landing. A green dome-like island came into sight, with a lighthouse on top, looking like the stick at the top of a haystack. "That's in the middle of the Belt, ma'am," said Brita. "In the winter many's the time the passengers across here have to land there and stay a day, or maybe two; and sometimes they come on the ice-boats. Very dangerous they are; they pull them on the ice, and if the ice breaks, jump in and row them."

It seemed to me that we were bearing strangely to the south: land was disappearing from view; the waves grew bigger and higher; spray dashed on the deck; white-caps tossed in all directions.

"I believe we are going out to sea," said I.

"It does look like it, ma'am," replied the "child of Nature." "Shall I go and ask?"

"Yes," I replied, "go and ask." She returned with consternation in every line of her aged face.

"Oh, ma'am, it's strange they should have told you so wrong. We're on this boat till four in the afternoon."

And so we were, and a half-hour to boot, owing to the southeast wind which was dead ahead all the way. Everybody was ill,-my poor old protectress most of all, and for the first time in her life.

"Oh, ma'am, I did not think it could be like this," she gasped. "I never did feel so awful." I sat grimly still in one spot on the deck all that day. What a day it was! About noon it occurred to me that some grapes would be a relief to my misery. Opening the basket and taking out the bag in which the English-speaking waiter had told me were my grapes, I put in my hand and drew out-a hard, corky, tasteless pear! Thanks to the southeast wind, we came a half-hour late to Kiel, and thereby missed the train to Lubeck which we should have taken, waited two hours and a half in the station, and then had to take three different trains one after the other, and pay an extra fare on each one; how we ever stumbled through I don't know, but we did, and at half-past eleven we were in Lubeck, safe and sound, and not more than three quarters dead! and I shall laugh whenever I think of it as long as I live.

Lubeck is an old town, well worth several days' study; and the Stadt Hamburg is a comfortable house to sleep and be fed in. You can have a mutton-chop there, and that is a thing hard to find in Germany; and you can have your mutton-chop brought to you by an "English-speaking" waiter who speaks English; and you may have it delicately served in your own room, or in a pretty dining-room, or on a front porch, walled in thick by oleander-trees, ten and fifteen feet high,-a lustrous wall of green, through which you have glimpses of such old gables and high peaked roofs, red-tiled, and scooped into queer curves, as I do not know elsewhere except in Nuremberg. It all dates back to 1100 and 1200, and thereabouts,-which does not sound so very old to you when you have just come from Norway, where a thing is not ancient unless it dates back to somewhere near Christ's time; but for a medi?val town, Lubeck has a fine flavor of antiquity about it. It has some splendid old gateways, and plenty of old houses, two-thirds roof, one-third gable, and four-fifths dormer-window, with door-posts and corners carved in the leisurely way peculiar to that time. Really, one would think a man must have his house ordered before he was born, to have got it done in time to die in, in those days. I have speculated very much about this problem, and it puzzles me yet. So many of these old houses look as if it must have taken at least the years of one generation to have made the carvings on them; perhaps the building and ornamentation of the house was a thing handed down from father to son and to son's son, like famous games of chess. Nothing less than this seems to me to explain the elaboration of fine hand-wrought decorations in the way of carving and tapestries, which were the chief splendors of splendid living in those old times. There is a room in the Merchants' Exchange in Lubeck, which is entirely walled and ceiled with carved wood-work taken out of an ancient house belonging to one of Lubeck's early burgomasters. These carvings were done in 1585 by "an unknown master," and were recently transferred to this room to preserve them. The panels of wood alternate with panels of exquisitely wrought alabaster; two rows of these around the room. There were old cupboard doors, now firmly fastened on the wall, never to swing again; and one panel, with a group of wood-carvers at work, said-or guessed-to be the portraits of the carver and his assistants. The old shutters are there,-each decorated with a group, or single figure,-every face as expressive as if it were painted in oil by a master's hand. Every inch of the wall is wrought into some form of decorations; the ceiling is carved into great squares, with alabaster knobs at the intersections; a superb chandelier of ancient Venetian glass hangs in the middle; and the new room stands to-day exactly as the old one stood in the grand old burgomaster's day. It is kept insured by the Merchants' Guild for $30,000, but twice that sum could not replace it. The Merchants' Guild of Lubeck must contain true art-lovers; a large room opening from this one has also finely carved walls, and a frieze of the old burgomasters' portraits, and another fine Venetian glass chandelier, two centuries old. Through the window I caught a glimpse of a spiral stair outside the building; it wound in short turns, and the iron balustrade was a wall of green vines; it looked like the stair to the chamber of a princess, but it was only the outside way to another room where the Merchants held their sittings.

The largest of the Lubeck churches is the Church of Saint Mary. This was built so big, it is said, simply to outdo the cathedral in size, the Lubeck citizens being determined to have their church bigger than the bishop's. The result is three hundred and thirty-five feet of a succession of frightful rococo things, enough to drive the thought of worship out of any head that has eyes in it. The exterior is fine, being of the best style of twelfth-century brick-work, and there are some fine and interesting things to be seen inside; but the general effect of the interior is indescribably hideous, with huge grotesque carvings in black and white marble and painted wood, at every pillar of the arches. In one of the chapels is a series of paintings, ascribed to Holbein,-"The Dance of Death." It is a ghastly picture, with a certain morbid fascination about it,-a series of fantastic figures, alternating with grim skeleton figures of Death. The emperor, the pope, the king and queen, the law-giver, the merchant, the peasant, the miser,-all are there, hand in hand with the grim, grappling, leaping skeleton, who will draw them away. Under each figure is a stanza of verse representing his excuse for delay, his reply to Death,-all in vain. This chapel had the most uncanny fascination to my companion.

"Oh, ma'am! oh, indeed, ma'am, it is too true!" she exclaimed, walking about, and peering through her spectacles at each motto. "It is all the same for the pope and the emperor. Death calls us all; and we all would like to stay a little longer."

By a fine bronze reclining statue of one of the old bishops she lingered. "Is it not wonderful, ma'am, the pride there is in this poor world?" she said. The reflection seemed to me a very just one, as I too looked at the old man lying there in his mitre, with the sacred wafer ostentatiously held in one hand, and his crosier in the other; every inch of him, and of the great bronze slab on which he lay, wrought as exquisitely as the finest etching.

At twelve o'clock every day a crowd gathers in this church to see a procession of little figures come out of the huge clock; the Lubeck people, it seems, never tire of this small miracle. It must be acknowledged that it is a droll sight: but one would think, seeing that there are only forty thousand people in the town, that there would now and then be a day without a crowd; yet the sacristan said, that, rain or shine, every day, the little chapel was full at the striking of the first stroke of twelve. The show is on the back of the clock, which detracts very much from its effect. At the instant of twelve a tiny white statue lifted its arm, struck a hammer on the bell twelve times; at the first stroke a door opened, and out came a procession of eight figures, called the Emperor and the Electors; each glided around the circle, paused in the middle, made a jerky bow to the figure of Christ in the centre, and then disappeared in a door in the other side, which closed after them. The figures seemed only a few inches tall at that great height; and the whole thing like part of a Punch and Judy show, and quite in keeping with the rococo ornaments on the pillars. But the crowd gazed as devoutly as if it had been the elevation of the Host itself; and I hurried away, fearing that they might resent the irreverent look on my countenance.

There are some carved brass tablets which are superb, and a curious old altar-piece, with doors opening after doors, like a succession of wardrobes, one inside the other, the first doors painted on the inside, the second also painted, and disclosing, on being opened, a series of wonderful wood carvings of Scriptural scenes, these opening out again and showing still others; a fine canopy of wrought wood above them, as delicate as filigree. These are disfigured, as so many of the exquisite wood carvings of this time are, by being painted in grotesque colors; but the carving is marvellous. The thing that interested me most in this church was a tiny little stone mouse carved at the base of one of the pillars. You might go all your life to that church and never see it. I searched for it long before I found it. It is a tiny black mouse gnawing at the root of an oak; and some old stone-worker put it in there six hundred years ago, because it was the ancient emblem of the city. There was also a line of old saints and apostles carved on the ends of the pews, that were fine; a Saint Christopher with the child on his shoulder that I would have liked to filch and carry away.

In the Jacobi Kirche-a church not quite so old-is a remarkable old altar, which a rich burgomaster hit on the device of bestowing on the church and immortalizing his own family in it at the same time. To make it all right for the church, he had the scene of the crucifixion carved in stone for the centre; then on the doors, which must be thrown back to show this stone carving, he had himself and his family painted. And I venture to say that the event justifies his expectations; for one looks ten minutes at the burgomaster's sons and daughters and wife for one at the stone carving inside. It is a family group not to be forgotten,-the burgomaster and his five sons behind him on one door, and his wife with her five daughters in front of her on the other door. They are all kneeling, so as to seem to be adoring the central figures,-all but the burgomaster's wife, who stands tall and stately, stiff in gold brocade, with a missal in one hand and a long feather in the other; a high cap of the same brocade, flying sleeves at the shoulder, and a long bodice in front complete the dame's array. Three of the daughters wear high foolscaps of white; white robes trimmed with ermine, falling from the back of the neck, thrown open to show fine scarlet gowns, with bodices laced over white, and coming down nearly to their knees in front. Two little things in long-sleeved dark-green gowns-"not out" yet, I suppose-kneel modestly in front; and a nun and a saint or a Virgin Mary are thrown into the group to make it holy. The burgomaster is in a black fur-trimmed robe, kneeling with a book open before him,-the very model of a Pharisee at family prayers,-his five sons kneeling behind him in scarlet robes trimmed with dark fur.

The sacristan said something in German to Brita, which she instantly translated to me as "Oh, ma'am, to think of it! They're all buried here under our very feet, ma'am,-the whole family! And they'd to leave all that finery behind them, didn't they, ma'am?" The thought of their actual dust being under our feet at that moment seemed to make the family portraits much more real. I dare say that burgomaster never did anything worthy of being remembered in all his life; but he has hit on a device which will secure him and his race a place in the knowledge of men for centuries to come.

In the Rathhaus-which is one of the quaintest buildings in Lubeck-there is an odd old chimney-piece. It is downstairs, in what one would call vaults, except that they are used for the rooms of a restaurant. It has been for centuries a Lubeck custom that when a couple have been married in the Church of Saint Mary (which adjoins the Rathhaus), they should come into this room to drink their first winecup together; and, by way of giving a pleasant turn to things for the bridegroom, the satirical old wood-carvers wrought a chimney-piece for this room with a cock on one side, a hen on the other, the Israelitish spies bearing the huge bunch of the over-rated grapes of Eshcol between them, and in the centre below it this motto: "Many a man sings loudly when they bring him his bride. If he knew what they brought him, he might well weep." It is an odd thing how universally, when this sort of slur upon marriage is aimed at, it is the man's disappointment which is set forth or predicted, and not the woman's. It is a very poor rule, no doubt; but it may at least be said to "work both ways." There used to be an underground passage-way by which they came from the church into this room, but it is shut up now. While we sat waiting in the outer hall upstairs for the janitor to come and show us this room, a bridal couple came down and passed out to their carriage,-plain people of the working class. She wore a black alpaca gown, and had no bridal sign or symptom about her, except the green myrtle wreath on her head. But few brides look happier than she did.

The Rathhaus makes one side of the Market-place, which was, like all market-places, picturesque at eleven in the morning, dirty and dismal at four in the afternoon. I drove through it several times in the course of the forenoon; and at last the women came to know me, and nodded and smiled as we passed. Their hats were wonderful to see,-cocked up on top of a neat white cap, with its frill all at the back and none in front; the hats shaped-well, nobody could say how they were shaped-like half a washbowl bent up, with the little round centre rim left in behind! I wonder if that gives an idea to anybody who has not seen the hat. The real wonder, however, was not in the shape, but in the material. They are made of wood,-actually of wood,-split up into the finest threads, and sewed like straw; and the women make them themselves. All the vegetable women had theirs bound with bright green, with long green loops hanging down behind; but the fishwomen had theirs bound with narrow black binding round the edge, lined with purple calico, and with black ribbon at the back. Finally, after staring a dozen of the good souls out of countenance looking at their heads, I bought one of the bonnets outright! It was the cleanest creature ever seen that sold it to me. She pulled it off her head, and sold it as readily as she would have sold me a dozen eels out of her basket; and I carried it on my arm all the way from Lubeck to Cassel, and from Cassel to Munich, to the great bewilderment of many railway officials and travellers. Before I had concluded my bargain there was a crowd ten deep all around the carriage. Everybody-men, women, children-left their baskets and stalls, and came to look on. I believe I could have bought the entire wardrobe of the whole crowd, if I had so wished,-so eager and pleased did they look, talking volubly with each other, and looking at me. It was a great occasion for Brita, who harangued them all by instalments from the front seat, and explained to them that the bonnet was going all the way to America, and that her "lady" had a great liking for all "national" things, which touched one old lady's patriotism so deeply that she pulled off her white cap and offered it to me, making signs that my wooden bonnet was incomplete without the cap, as it certainly was. On Brita's delicately calling her attention to the fact that her cap was far from clean, she said she would go home and wash it and flute it afresh, if the lady would only buy it; and three hours later she actually appeared with it most exquisitely done up, and not at all dear for the half-dollar she asked for it. After buying this bonnet I drove back to the hotel with it, ate my lunch in the oleander-shaded porch, and then set off again to see the cathedral. This proved to me a far more interesting church than Saint Mary's, though the guide-books say that Saint Mary's is far the finer church of the two. There is enough ugliness in both of them, for that matter, to sink them. But in the cathedral there are some superb bronzes and brasses, and a twisted iron railing around the pulpit, which is so marvellous in its knottings and twistings that a legend has arisen that the devil made it.

"How very much they seem to have made of the devil in the olden time, ma'am, do they not?" remarked Brita, entirely unconscious of the fact that she was philosophizing; "wherever we have been, there have been so many things named in his honor!"

The clock in this church has not been deemed worthy of mention in the guide-books; but it seemed to me far more wonderful than the one at Saint Mary's. I shall never forget it as long as I live; in fact, I fear I shall live to wish I could. The centre of the dial plate is a huge face of gilt, with gilt rays streaming out from it; two enormous eyes in this turn from side to side as the clock ticks, right, left, right, left, so far each time that it is a squint,-a horrible, malignant, diabolical squint. It seems almost irreverent even to tell you that this is to symbolize the never-closing eye of God. The uncanny fascination of these rolling eyes cannot be described. It is too hideous to look at, yet you cannot look away. I sat spellbound in a pew under it for a long time. On the right hand of the clock stands a figure representing the "Genius of Time." This figure holds a gold hammer in its hand, and strikes the quarter-hours. On the other side stands Death,-a naked skeleton,-with an hour-glass. At each hour he turns his hour-glass, shakes his head, and with a hammer in his right hand strikes the hour. I heard him strike "three," and I confess a superstitious horror affected me. The thought of a congregation of people sitting Sunday after Sunday looking at those rolling eyes, and seeing that skeleton strike the hour and turn his hour-glass, is monstrous. Surely there was an epidemic in those middle ages of hideous and fantastic inventions. I am not at all sure that it has not stamped its impress on the physiognomy of the German nation. I never see a crowd of Germans at a railway station without seeing in dozens of faces resemblance to ugly gargoyles. And why should it not have told on them? The women of old Greece brought forth beautiful sons and daughters, it is said, because they looked always on beautiful statues and pictures. The German women have been for a thousand years looking at grotesque and leering or coarse and malignant gargoyles carved everywhere,-on the gateways of their cities, in their churches, on the very lintels of their houses. Why should not the German face have been slowly moulded by these prenatal influences?

Above this malevolent clock was a huge scaffold beam, crossing the entire width of the church, and supporting four huge figures, carved with some skill; the most immodest Adam and Eve I ever beheld; a bishop and a Saint John and a Mary,-these latter kneeling in adoration of a crucifixion above. The whole combination-the guilty Adam and Eve, the pompous bishop, the repulsive crucifixion, the puppet clock with its restless eyes and skeleton, and the loud tick-tock, tick-tock, of the pendulum,-all made up a scene of grotesqueness and irreverence mingled with superstition and devotion, such as could not be found anywhere except in a German church of the twelfth century. It was a relief to turn from it and go into the little chapel, where stands the altar-piece made sacred as well as famous by the hands of that tender spiritual painter, Memling. These altar-pieces look at first sight so much like decorated wardrobes that it is jarring. I wish they had fashioned them otherwise. In this one, for instance, it is almost a pain to see on the outside doors of what apparently is a cupboard one of Memling's angels (the Gabriel) and the Mary listening to his message. Throwing these doors back, you see life-size figures of four saints,-John, Jerome, Blasius, and ?gidius. The latter is a grand dark figure, with a head and face to haunt one. Opening these doors again, you come to the last,-a landscape with the crucifixion in the foreground, and other scenes from the Passion of the Saviour. This is less distinctively Memling-like; in fact, the only ones of them all which one would be willing to say positively no man's hand but Memling's had touched, are the two tender angels in white on the outside shutters.

We left Lubeck very early in the morning. As we drove to the station, the milkmen and milkwomen were coming in, in their pretty carts, full of white wooden firkins, brass bound, with queer long spouts out on one side; brass measures of different sizes, and brass dippers, all shining as if they had been fresh scoured that very morning, made the carts a pretty spectacle. And the last thing of all which I stopped to look at in Lubeck was the best of all,-an old house with a turreted bay-window on the corner, and this inscription on the front between the first and second stories of the house:-

"North and south, the world is wide:

East and west, home is best."

It was in Platt Deutsch; and oddly enough, the servant of the house, who was at the door, did not know what it meant; and the first two men we asked did not know what it meant,-stared at it stupidly, shrugged their shoulders, and shook their heads. It was a lovely motto for a house, but not a good one for wanderers away from home to look at. It brought a sudden sense of homesickness, like an odor of a flower or a bar of music which has an indissoluble link with home.

It took a whole day to go from Lubeck to Cassel, but the day did not seem long. It was a series of pictures, and poor Brita's raptures over it all were at once amusing and pathetic. As soon as we began to see elevated ground, she became excited. "Oh, oh, ma'am," she exclaimed, "talk about scenery in Denmark! It is too flat. I am so used to the flat country, the least hill is beautiful." "Do you not call this grand?" she would say, at the sight of a hill a hundred or two feet high. It was a good lesson of the meaning of the word relative. After all, one can hardly conceive what it must be to live sixty-four years on a dead level of flatness. A genuine mountain would probably be a terror to a person who had led such a life. Brita's face, when I told her that I lived at the foot of mountains more than twelve times as high as any she had seen, was a study for incredulity and wonder. I think she thought I was lying. It was the hay harvest. All the way from Lubeck to Cassel were men and women, all hard at work in the fields; the women swung their scythes as well as the men, but looked more graceful while raking. Some wore scarlet handkerchiefs over their heads, some white; all had bare legs well in sight. At noon we saw them in groups on the ground, and towards night walking swiftly along the roads, with their rakes over their shoulders. I do not understand why travellers make such a to-do always about the way women work in the fields in Germany. I am sure they are far less to be pitied than the women who work in narrow, dark, foul streets of cities; and they look a thousand times healthier. Our road lay for many hours through a beautiful farm country: red brick houses and barns with high thatched roofs, three quarters of the whole building being thatched roof; great sweeps of meadow, tracts of soft pines, kingdoms of beeches,-the whole forest looking like a rich yellow brown moss in the distance, and their mottled trunks fairly shining out in the cross sunbeams, as if painted; wide stretches of brown opens, with worn paths leading off across them; hedges everywhere, and never a fence or a wall; mountain-ash trees, scarlet full; horse-chestnuts by orchards; towns every few minutes, and our train halting at them all long enough for the whole town to make up their minds whether they could go or not, pack their bags, and come on board; bits of marsh, with labyrinths of blue water in and out in it, so like tongues of the sea that, forgetting where I was, I said, "I wonder if that is fresh water." "It must be, ma'am," replied the observant Brita, "inasmuch as the white lilies are floating beautiful and large in it."

"Oh," she suddenly ejaculated, "how strange it was! Napoleon III. he thought he would get a good bit of this beautiful Germany for a birthday present, and be in Berlin on his birthday; and instead of that the Prussians were in Berlin on his birthday."

At Lüneburg we came into the heather. I thought I knew heather, but I was to discover my mistake. All the heather of my life heretofore-English, Scotch, Norwegian-had been no more than a single sprig by the side of this. "The dreary Lüneburg Heath," the discriminating Baedeker calls it. The man who wrote that phrase must have been not only color-blind, he must have been color-dead! If a mountain is "dreary" when it turns purple pink or pink purple five minutes before the rising sun is going to flash full on its eastern front, then the Lüneburg Heath is "dreary." Acres of heather, miles of heather; miles after miles, hour after hour, of swift railroad riding, and still heather! The purple and the pink and the browns into which the purple and pink blended and melted, shifted every second, and deepened and paled in the light and the shadow, as if the earth itself were gently undulating. Two or three times, down vistas among the low birches, I saw men up to their knees in the purple, apparently reaping it with a sickle. A German lady in the car explained that they cut it to strew in the sheep-stalls for the sheep to sleep on, and that the sheep ate it: bed, bed-blanket, and breakfast all in one! Who would not be a sheep? Here and there were little pine groves in this heath; the pine and the birch being the only trees which can keep any footing against heather when it sets out to usurp a territory, and even they cannot grow large or freely. Three storks rose from these downs as we passed, and flew slowly away, their great yellow feet shining as if they had on gold slippers.

"The country people reckon it a great blessing, ma'am, if a stork will build its nest on their roof," said Brita. "I dare say it is thought so in America the same." "No, Brita, we have no storks in America," I said. "I dare say some other bird, then, you hold the same," she replied, in a tone so taking it for granted that no nation of people could be without its sacred domestic bird that I was fain to fall back on the marten as our nearest approach to such a bird; and I said boastfully that we built houses for them in our yards, that they never built on roofs.

At Celle, when she caught sight of the castle where poor Caroline Matilda died, she exclaimed, "Oh, ma'am, that is where our poor queen died. It was the nasty Queen Dowager did it; it was, indeed, ma'am. And the king had opened the ball with her that very night that he signed the order to send her away. They took her in her ball-dress, just as she was. If they had waited till morning the Danes would have torn her out of the wagon, for they worshipped her. She screamed for her baby, and they just tossed it to her in the wagon; and she was only twenty."

Pages of guide-book could not have so emphasized the tragedy of that old gray castle as did Brita's words and her tearful eyes, and "nasty old Queen Dowager." I suppose the truth will never be known about that poor young queen; history whiffles round so from century to century that it seems hardly worth while to mind about it. At any rate, it can't matter much to either Caroline or Struensee, her lover, now.

Cassel at nine o'clock. Friendly faces and voices and hands, and the very air of America in every room. It was like a dream; and like a dream vanished, after twenty-four hours of almost unceasing talk and reminiscence and interchange. "Blessings brighten," even more than "when they take their flight," when they pause in their flight long enough for us to come up with them and take another look at them.

Cassel is the healthiest town in all Germany; and when you see it you do not wonder. High and dry and clear, and several hundred feet up above the plain, it has off-looks to wide horizons in all directions. To the east and south are beautiful curves of high hills, called mountains here; thickly wooded, so that they make solid spaces of color, dark green or purple or blue, according to the time calendar of colors of mountains at a distance. (They have their time-tables as fixed as railway trains, and much more to be depended on.) There is no town in Germany which can compare with Cassel as a home for people wishing to educate children cheaply and well, and not wishing to live in the fashions and ways and close air of cities. It has a picture-gallery second to only one in Germany; it has admirable museums of all sorts; it has a first-rate theatre; good masters in all branches of study are to be had at low rates; living is cheap and comfortable (for Germany). The water is good; the climate also (for Germany); and last, not least, the surrounding country is full of picturesque scenery,-woods, high hills, streams; just such a region as a lover of Nature finds most repaying and enjoyable. In the matter of society, also, Cassel is especially favored, having taken its tone from the days of the Electors, and keeping still much of the old fine breeding of culture and courtesy.

It is a misfortune to want to go from Cassel to Munich in one day. It can be done; but it takes fourteen hours of very hard work,-three changes,-an hour's waiting at one place, and half an hour at another, and the road for the last half of the day so rough that it could honestly be compared to nothing except horseback riding over bowlders at a rapid rate. This is from Gemunden to Munich: if there is any other way of getting there, I think nobody would go by this; so I infer that there is not. You must set off, also, at the unearthly hour of 5 A.M.,-an hour at which all virtues ooze out of one; even honesty out of cabmen, as I found at Cassel, when a man to whom I had paid four marks-more than twice the regular fare-for bringing us a five minutes' distance to the railway station, absolutely had the face to ask three marks more. Never did I so long for a command of the German tongue. I only hope that the docile Brita translated for me literally what I said, as I handed him twelve cents more, with, "I gave one dollar because you had to get up so early in the morning. You know very well that even half that sum is more than the price at ordinary times. I will give you this fifty pfennigs for yourself, and not another pfennig do you get!" I wish that the man that invented the word pfennig had to "do a pour of it for one tousand year," as dear old Dr. Pr?hl said of the teapot that would not pour without spilling. I think it is the test-word of the German language. The nearest direction I could give for pronouncing it would be: fill your mouth with hasty-pudding, then say purr-f-f-f-f-f, and then gulp the pudding and choke when you come to the g,-that's a pfennig; and the idea of such a name as that for a contemptible thing of which it takes one hundred to make a quarter of a dollar! They do them up in big nickel pieces too,-heavy, and so large that in the dark you always mistake them for something else. Ten hundredths of a quarter!-you could starve with your purse loaded down with them.

In the station, trudging about as cheerily as if they were at home, was a poor family,-father, mother, and five little children,-evidently about to emigrate. Each carried a big bundle; even the smallest toddler had her parcel tied up in black cloth with a big cord. The mother carried the biggest bundle of all,-a baby done up in a bedquilt, thick as a comforter; the child's head was pinned in tight as its feet,-not one breath of air could reach it.

"Going to America, ma'am," said Brita, "I think they must be. Oh, ma'am, there was five hundred sailed in one ship for America, last summer,-all to be Mormons; and the big fellow that took them, with his gold spectacles, I could have killed him. They'll be wretched enough when they come to find what they've done. Brigham Young's dead, but there must be somebody in his place that's carrying it on the same. They'd not be allowed to stay in Denmark, ma'am,-oh, no, they've got to go out of the country."

All day again we journeyed through the hay harvest,-the same picturesque farm-houses, with their high roofs thatched or dark-tiled, their low walls white or red or pink, marked off into odd-shaped intervals by lattice-work of wood; no fences, no walls; only the coloring to mark divisions of crops. Town after town snugged round its church; the churches looked like hens with their broods gathered close around them, just ready to go under the wings. We had been told that we need not change cars all the way to Munich; so, of course, we had to change three times,-bundled out at short notice, at the last minute, to gather ourselves up as we might. In one of these hurried changes I dropped my stylographic pen. Angry as I get with the thing when I am writing with it, my very heart was wrung with sorrow at its loss. Without much hope of ever seeing it again, I telegraphed for it. The station-master who did the telegraphing was profoundly impressed by Brita's description of the "wonderful instrument" I had lost. "A self-writing pen,"-she called it. I only wish it were! "You shall hear at the next station if it has been found," he said. Sure enough, at the very next station the guard came to the door. "Found and will be sent," he said; and from that on he regarded me with a sort of awe-stricken look whenever he entered the car. I believe he considered me a kind of female necromancer from America! and no wonder, with two self-writing pens in my possession, for luckily I had my No. 2 in my travelling-bag to show as sample of what I had lost.

At Elm we came into a fine hilly region,-hills that had to be tunnelled or climbed over by zigzags; between them were beautiful glimpses of valleys and streams. Brita was nearly beside herself, poor soul! Her "Oh's" became something tragic. "Oh, ma'am, it needs no judge to see that God has been here!" she cried. "We must think on the Building-Master when we see such scenery as this."

As we came out on the broader plains, the coloring of the villages grew colder; unlatticed white walls, and a colder gray to the roofs, the groups of houses no longer looked like crowds of furry creatures nestled close for protection. Some rollicking school girls, with long hair flying, got into our carriage, and chattered, and ate cake, and giggled; the cars rocked us to and fro on our seats as if we were in a saddle on a run-away horse in a Colorado ca?on. All the rough roads I have ever been on have been smooth gliding in comparison with this. At nine o'clock, Munich, and a note from the dear old "Fraulein" to say that her house was full, but she had rooms engaged for me near by. The next day I went to see her, and found her the same old inimitable dear as ever,-the eyes and the smile not a day older, and the drollery and the mimicry all there; but, alas! old age has come creeping too close not to hurt in some ways, and an ugly rheumatism prevents her from walking and gives her much pain. I had hoped she could go to Oberammergau with me; but it is out of the question. At night she sent over to me the loveliest basket of roses and forget-me-nots and mignonette, with a card, "Good-night, my dear lady,-I kiss you;" and I am not too proud to confess that I read it with tears in my eyes. The dear, faithful, loving soul!

THE VILLAGE OF OBERAMMERGAU.

Mountains and valleys and rivers are in league with the sun and summer-and, for that matter, with winter too-to do their best in the Bavarian Highlands. Lofty ranges, ever green at base, ever white at top, are there tied with luminous bands of meadow into knots and loops, and knots and loops again, tightening and loosening, opening and shutting in labyrinths, of which only rivers know the secret and no man can speak the charm. Villages which find place in lands like these take rank and relation at once with the divine organic architecture already builded; seem to become a part of Nature; appear to have existed as long as the hills or the streams, and to have the same surety of continuance. How much this natural correlation may have had to do with the long, unchanging simplicities of peoples born and bred in these mountain haunts, it would be worth while to analyze. Certain it is that in all peasantry of the hill countries in Europe, there are to be seen traits of countenance and demeanor,-peculiarities of body, habits, customs, and beliefs which are indigenous and lasting, like plants and rocks. Mere lapse of time hardly touches them; they have defied many centuries; only now in the mad restlessness of progress of this the nineteenth do they begin to falter. But they have excuse when Alps have come to be tunnelled and glaciers are melted and measured.

Best known of all the villages that have had the good fortune to be born in the Bavarian Highlands is Oberammergau, the town of the famous Passion Play. But for the Passion Play the great world had never found Oberammergau out, perhaps; yet it might well be sought for itself. It lies 2,600 feet above the sea, at the head of a long stretch of meadow lands, which the River Ammer keeps green for half the year,-at the head of these, and in the gateway of one of the most beautiful walled valleys of the Alps. The Ammer is at once its friend and foe; in summer a friend, but malicious in spring, rising suddenly after great rains or thaws, and filling the valley with a swift sea, by which everything is in danger of being swept away. In 1769 it tore through the village with a flood like a tidal wave, and left only twelve houses standing.

High up on one of the mountain-sides, northeast of the village, is a tiny spot of greensward, near the course of one of the mountain torrents which swell the Ammer. This green spot is the Oberammergauers' safety-gauge. So long as that is green and clear the valley will not be flooded; as soon as the water is seen shining over that spot it is certain that floods will be on in less than an hour, and the whole village is astir to forestall the danger. The high peaks, also, which stand on either side the town, are friend and foe alternately. White with snow till July, they keep stores of a grateful coolness for summer heats; but in winter the sun cannot climb above them till nine o'clock, and is lost in their fastnesses again at one. Terrible hail-storms sometimes whirl down from their summits. On the 10th of May, 1774, there were three of these hail-storms in one day, which killed every green blade and leaf in the fields. One month later, just as vegetation had fairly started again, came another avalanche of hail, and killed everything a second time. On the 13th of June, 1771, snow lay so deep that men drove in sledges through the valley. This was a year never to be forgotten. In 1744 there was a storm of rain, thunder, and lightning, in which the electric fire shot down like javelins into the town, set a score of houses on fire, and destroyed the church. One had need of goodly devotion to keep a composed mind and contented spirit in a dwelling-place surrounded by such dangers. The very elements, however, it seems, are becoming tamed by the inroads of civilization; for it is more than fifty years since Oberammergau has seen such hail or such lightning.

The village is, like all Tyrolean villages, built without apparent plan,-no two houses on a line, no two streets at right angles, everybody's house slanting across or against somebody else's house, the confusion really attaining the dignity of a fine art. If a child were to set out a toy village on the floor, decide hastily to put it back in its box, sweep it all together between his two hands, then change his mind, and let the houses remain exactly as they had fallen, with no change except to set them right side up, I think it would make a good map of Oberammergau. The houses are low, white-plastered, or else left of the natural color of the wood, which, as it grows old, is of a rich dark brown. The roofs project far over the eaves, and are held down by rows of heavy stones to keep them from blowing off in wind-storms. Tiny open-work balconies are twined in and out capriciously, sometimes filled with gay flowers, sometimes with hay and dried herbs, sometimes with the firewood for winter. Oberammergau knows in such matters no law but each man's pleasure. It is at each man's pleasure, also, where he will keep his manure-heap; and usually he elects to keep it close to the street, joining his barn or his house, or his neighbor's barn or house, at convenience. Except that there are many small sluices and rivulets and canals of spring water wandering about the village to carry off the liquidation, this would be intolerable, and surely would create pestilences. As it is, the odors are abominable, and are a perpetual drawback to the delight one would otherwise take in the picturesque little place.

There are many minute gardens and bits of orchard of all possible shapes,-as many and as many-sided as the figures in the first pages of Euclid. I saw one, certainly not containing more than eight square feet, which was seven-sided, fenced and joined to two houses. Purple phlox, dahlias, and lilacs are the favorite out-door flowers. Of these there were clumps and beds which might have been transported from New England. In the balconies and window-sills were scarlet geranium, white alyssum, and pansies.

The most striking natural feature of Oberammergau is the great mountain-peak to the southwest, called the Kofel. This is a bare, rocky peak of singularly bold contour. On its summit is set a large cross, which stands out always against the sky with a clearness almost solemn. The people regard this Kofel as the guardian angel of their village; and it is said that the reply was once made to persons who were urging the Passion Play actors to perform their play in England or America,-

"We would do so if it were possible; but to do that, it would be needful to take the entire village and our guardian spirit, the Kofel."

I arrived in Oberammergau on a Wednesday, and counted on finding myself much welcomed, three days in advance of the day of the play. Never was a greater mistake. A country cousin coming uninvited to make a visit in the middle of a busy housewife's spring house-cleaning would be as welcome. As I drove into the village the expression of things gave me alarm. Every fence, post, roof, bush, had sheets, pillow-cases, or towels drying on it; the porches and grass-plots were strewn with pillows and mattresses; a general fumigation and purification of a quarantined town could not have produced a greater look of being turned wrong side out. This is what the cleanly Oberammergau women do every week during the Passion Play season. It takes all the time intervening between the weekly representations of the play to make ready their bedrooms and beds.

I was destined to greater alarms and surprises, however. The Frau Rutz, to whom I had written for lodgings, and to whose house I drove all confident, had never heard of my name. It became instantaneously apparent to me that I probably represented to her mind perhaps the eleven hundred and thirty-seventh person who had stopped at her door with the same expectation. Half of her house was being re-roofed, "to be done by Sunday;" all her bed-linen was damp in baskets in the kitchen; and she and her sister were even then ironing for dear life to be done in time to begin baking and brewing on the next day. Evidently taking time by the forelock was a good way to come to a dead-lock in Oberammergau. To house after house I drove,-to Frau Zwink's bird-cage, perched on the brink of a narrow canal, and half over it, it seemed. Just before me stood a post-carriage, at Frau Zwink's door; and as I stepped out two English ladies with bags, bundles, and umbrellas disappeared within Frau Zwink's door, having secured the only two available perches in the cage. The Frau came running with urgent solicitations that I should examine a closet she had, which she thought might answer.

"Oh, is she the lady of the house, and she barefoot?" exclaimed my Danish maid, aghast at the spectacle. Yet I afterwards heard that the Frau Zwink's was one of the notably comfortable lodging-places in the town. In another house were shown to us two small dark rooms, to reach which one must climb a ladder out of the common living-room of the family. From house after house came the response, "No rooms; all promised for Saturday." At intervals I drove back to Frau Rutz's for further suggestions. At last she became gradually impressed with a sense of responsibility for our fortunes; and the mystery of her knowing nothing about my letter was cleared up. Her nephew had charge of the correspondence; she never saw the letters; he had not yet had time to answer one half of the letters he had received. Most probably my letter might be in his pocket now. Friendship grew up between my heart and the heart of the Frau Rutz as we talked. Who shall fathom or sound these bonds which create themselves so quickly with one, so slowly with another? She was an Oberammergau peasant, who knew no word of my tongue; I a woman of another race, life, plane, who could not speak one word she could comprehend, and our interpreter was only a servant; but I think I do not exaggerate when I say that the Frau and I became friends. I know I am hers; and I think if I were in Oberammergau in need, I should find that she was mine.

By some unexplained accident (if there be such things) the best room in all Oberammergau was still left free,-a great sunny room, with a south window and east windows, a white porcelain stove, an old-fashioned spinnet, a glass-doored corner-cupboard full of trinkets, old-fashioned looking-glasses, tables, and two good beds; and of this I took possession in incredulous haste. It was in the house of George Lang, merchant, the richest man in the town. The history of the family of which he is now the leading representative is identified with the fortunes of Oberammergau for a century past. It is an odd thing that this little village should have had its line of merchant princes,-a line dating back a hundred years, marked by the same curious points of heredity as that of the Vanderbilts or Astors in America, and the Rothschilds in Europe; men as shrewd, sharp, foreseeing, fore-planning, and executive in their smaller way, and perhaps as arbitrary in their monopolies, as some of our millionnaires.

In 1765 there lived in the service of the monastery at Ettal a man named Joseph Lang. He was a trusted man, a sort of steward and general supervisor. When the monastery was suppressed, Joseph Lang's occupation was gone. He was a handy man, both with tools and with colors, and wandering down to Oberammergau, halted for a little to see if he could work himself in with the industry already established there of toy-making. At first he made simply frames, and of the plainest sort; soon-perhaps from a reverent bias for still ministering to the glory of the church, but probably quite as much from his trader's perception of the value of an assured market-he began to paint wooden figures of saints, apostles, Holy Virgins, and Christs. These figures at first he imported from the Tyrol, painted them, and sent them back there to be sold. Before long he had a large majority of the Oberammergau villagers working under his direction as both carvers and colorers in this business,-a great enlargement of their previous trade of mere toy-making.

This man had eleven sons. Ten of them were carvers in wood, one was a painter and gilder. All these sons worked together in the continuing and building up of their father's business. One of them, George Lang, perceiving the advantage of widening business connections, struck out for the world at large, established agencies for his house in many countries, chiefly in Russia, and came home to die. He had six sons and four or five daughters, it is not certainly known which; for, as the present George Lang said, telling this genealogical history in his delightful English: "The archives went up in fire once, so they did not know exactly." All six of these sons followed the trades of carving, painting, and gilding. One of them, the youngest, Johann, continued the business, succeeding to his father's position in 1824. He was perhaps the cleverest man of the line. He went from country to country, all over Europe, and had his agents in America, England, Australia, Russia. He was on terms of acquaintance with people in high position everywhere, and was sometimes called "The King of Oberammergau." Again and again the villagers wished to make him burgomaster or magistrate, but he would not accept the position. Nevertheless it finally came to pass that all legal writings of the town, leases, conveyances, etc., made, were signed by his name as well as by the names of the recognized officials. First, "the magistracy of Oberammergau," then, "Johann Lang, Agent," as he persisted in calling himself, ran in the records of the parties to transactions in Oberammergau at that time.

In 1847 the village began to be in great trouble. A large part of it was burned; sickness swept it; whole families were homeless, or without father or brother to support them. Now shone out the virtues of this "King of Oberammergau," who would not be its burgomaster. He supported the village: to those who could work he gave work, whether the work had present value to him or not; to those who could not work he gave food, shelter, clothes. He was a rich man in 1847, when the troubles began. In 1849 he was poor, simply from his lavish giving. He had only two sons, to both of whom he gave an education in the law. Thus the spell of the succession of the craft of wood-workers was broken. No doubt ambition had entered into the heart of the "King of Oberammergau" to place his sons higher in the social scale than any success in mere trade could lift them. One of these sons is now burgomaster of the village; he is better known to the outside world as the Caiaphas of the Passion Play. To one knowing the antecedents of his house, the dramatic power with which he assumes and renders the Jewish High-Priest's haughty scorn, impatience of opposition, contempt for the Nazarene, will be seen to have a basis in his own pride of birth and inherited habit of authority.

The other son, having been only moderately successful in making his way in the world as a lawyer, returned to Oberammergau, succeeded to his father's business in 1856, but lived only a short time, dying in 1859. He left a widow and six children,-three sons and three daughters. For a time the widow and a sister-in-law carried on the business. As the sons grew up, two of them gradually assumed more and more the lead in affairs, and now bid fair to revive and restore the old traditions of the family power and success. One of them is in charge of a branch of the business in England, the other in Oberammergau. The third son is an officer in the Bavarian army. The aunt is still the accountant and manager of the house, and the young people evidently defer to her advice and authority.

The daughters have been educated in Munich and at convents, and are gentle, pleasing, refined young women. At the time of the Passion Play in 1880 they did the honors of their house to hundreds of strangers, who were at once bewildered and delighted to find, standing behind their chairs at dinner, young women speaking both English and French, and as courteously attentive to their guests' every wish as if they had been extending the hospitality of the "King of Oberammergau," a half-century back.

Their house is in itself a record. It stands fronting an irregular open, where five straggling roadways meet, making common centre of a big spring, from which water runs ceaselessly day and night into three large tanks. The house thus commands the village, and it would seem no less than natural that all post and postal service should centre in it. It is the largest and far the best house in the place. Its two huge carved doors stand wide open from morning till night, like those of an inn. On the right-hand side of the hall is the post-office, combined with which is the usual universal shop of a country village, holding everything conceivable, from a Norway dried herring down to French sewing-silk. On the left-hand side are the warerooms of wood-carvings: the first two rooms for their sale; behind these, rooms for storing and for packing the goods, to send away; there are four of these rooms, and their piled-up cases bear testimony to the extent of the business they represent.

A broad, dark, winding stairway leads up to the second floor. Here are the living-rooms of the family; spacious, sunny, comfortable. At the farther end of this hall a great iron door leads into the barn; whenever it is opened, a whiff of the odor of hay sweeps through; and to put out your head from your chamber-door of a morning, and looking down the hall, to see straight into a big haymow, is an odd experience the first time it happens. The house faces southeast, and has a dozen windows, all the time blazing in sunlight,-a goodly thing in Oberammergau, where shadow and shade mean reeking damp and chill. On the south side of the house is an old garden, chiefly apple-orchard; under these trees, in sunny weather, the family take their meals, and at the time of the Passion Play more than fifty people often sat down at outdoor tables there. These trees were like one great aviary, so full were they of little sparrow-like birds, with breasts of cinnamon brown color, and black crests on their heads. They chatted and chattered like magpies, and I hardly ever knew them to be quiet except for a few minutes every morning, when, at half-past five, the village herd of fifty cows went by, each cow with a bell at her neck; and all fifty bells half ringing, half tolling, a broken, drowsy, sleepy, delicious chime, as if some old sacristan, but half awake, was trying to ring a peal. At the first note of this the birds always stopped,-half envious, I fancied. As the chime died away, they broke out again as shrill as ever, and even the sunrise did not interrupt them.

The open square in front of the house is a perpetual stage of tableaux. The people come and go, and linger there around the great water-tanks as at a sort of Bethesda, sunk to profaner uses of every-day cleansing. The commonest labors become picturesque performed in open air, with a background of mountains, by men and women with bare heads and bare legs and feet. Whenever I looked out of my windows I saw a picture worth painting. For instance, a woman washing her windows in the tanks, holding each window under the running stream, tipping it and turning it so quickly in the sunshine that the waters gliding off it took millions of prismatic hues, till she seemed to be scrubbing with rainbows; another with two tubs full of clothes, which she had brought there to wash, her petticoat tucked up to her knees, her arms bare to the shoulder, a bright red handkerchief knotted round her head, and her eyes flashing as she beat and lifted, wringing and tossing the clothes, and flinging out a sharp or a laughing word to every passer; another coming home at night with a big bundle of green grass under one arm, her rake over her shoulder, a free, open glance, and a smile and a bow to a gay postilion watering his horses; another who had brought, apparently, her whole stock of kitchen utensils there to be made clean,-jugs and crocks, and brass pans. How they glittered as she splashed them in and out! She did not wipe them, only set them down on the ground to dry, which seemed likely to leave them but half clean, after all. Then there came a dashing young fellow from the Tyrol, with three kinds of feathers in his green hat, short brown breeches, bare knees, gray yarn stockings with a pattern of green wreath knit in at the top, a happy-go-lucky look on his face, stooping down to take a mouthful of the swift-running water from the spout, and getting well splashed by missing aim with his mouth, to the uproarious delight of two women just coming in from their hay-making in the meadows, one of them balancing a hay-rake and pitchfork on her shoulder with one hand, and with the other holding her dark-blue petticoat carefully gathered up in front, full of hay; the other drawing behind her (not wheeling it) a low, scoop-shaped wheelbarrow full of green grass and clover,-these are a few of any day's pictures. And thither came every day Issa Kattan, from Bethlehem of Jud?a,-a brown-skinned, deer-eyed Syrian, who had come all the way from the Holy Land to offer to the Passion Play pilgrims mother-of-pearl trinkets wrought in Jerusalem; rosaries of pearl, of olive-wood, of seeds, scarlet, yellow, and black, wonderfully smooth, hard, and shining. He wore a brilliant red fez, and told his gentle lies in a voice as soft as the murmuring of wind in pines. He carried his wares in a small tray, hung, like a muff, by a cord round his neck, the rosaries and some strips of bright stuffs hanging down at each side and swinging back and forth in time to his slow tread. Issa paced the streets patiently from morn till night, but took good care to be at this watering-place many times in the course of the day, chiefly at the morning, and when the laborers were coming home at sunset.

Another vender, as industrious as he, but less picturesque, also haunted the spot: a man who, knowing how dusty the Passion Play pilgrims would be, had brought brushes to sell,-brushes big, little, round, square, thick, thin, long, short, cheap, dear, good, bad, and indifferent; no brush ever made that was not to be found hanging on that man's body, if you turned him round times enough. That was the way he carried his wares,-in tiers, strings, strata, all tied together and on himself in some inexplicable way. One would think he must have slipped himself into a dozen "cat's-cradles" of twine to begin with, and then had the brushes netted in and out on this foundation. All that remained to be seen of him was his head, above this bristling ball, and his feet shuffling below. To cap the climax of his grotesqueness, he wore on his back a wooden box, shaped like an Indian pappoose frame; and in this stood three or four lofty long-handled brushes for sweeping, which rose far above his head.

Another peasant woman-a hay-maker-I remember, who came one night; never again, though I watched longingly for her, or one like her. She wore a petticoat of umber-brown, a white blouse, a blue apron, a pink-and-white handkerchief over her head, pinned under her chin; under one arm she carried a big bunch of tall green grasses, with the tasselled heads hanging loose far behind her. On the other shoulder rested her pitchfork, and in the hand that poised the pitchfork she held a bunch of dahlias, red, white, and yellow.

But the daintiest and most memorable figure of all that flitted or tarried here, was a little brown-eyed, golden-haired maiden, not more than three years old. She lived near by, and often ran away from home. I saw her sometimes led by the hand, but oftenest without guide or protector,-never alone, however; for, rain or shine, early or late, she carried always in her arms a huge puppet, with a face bigger than her own. It wore a shawl and a knit hood, the child herself being always bareheaded. It was some time before I could fathom the mystery of this doll, which seemed shapeless yet bulky, and heavier than the child could well lift, though she tugged at it faithfully and with an expression of care, as we often see poor babies in cities lugging about babies a little younger than themselves. At last I caught the puppet out one day without its shawl, and the mystery was revealed. It was a milliner's bonnet-block, on which a face had been painted. No wonder it seemed heavy and shapeless; below the face was nothing but a rough base of wood. It appeared that as soon as the thing was given to the child, she conceived for it a most inconvenient and unmanageable affection,-would go nowhere without it, would not go to sleep without it, could hardly be induced to put it for one moment out of her tired little arms, which could hardly clasp it round. It seemed but a fitting reward to perpetuate some token of such faithfulness; and after a good deal of pleading I induced the child's aunt, in whose charge she lived, to bring her to be photographed with her doll in her arms. It was not an easy thing to compass this; for the only photographer of the town, being one of the singers in the chorus, had small leisure for the practice of his trade in the Passion Play year; but, won over by the novelty of the subject, he found an odd hour for us, and made the picture. The little thing was so frightened at the sight of the strange room and instruments that she utterly refused to stand alone for a second, which was not so much of a misfortune as I thought at first, for it gave me the aunt's face also; and a very characteristic Oberammergau face it is.

At the same time I also secured a photograph of the good Frau Rutz. It was an illustration of the inborn dramatic sense in the Oberammergau people, that when I explained to Frau Rutz that I wished her to sit for a picture of an Oberammergau woman at her carving, she took the idea instantly, and appeared prompt to the minute, with a vase of her own carving, her glue-pot, and all her tools, to lay on the table by her side. "Do you not think it would be better with these?" she said simply; then she took up her vase and tool, as if to work, seated herself at the table in a pose which could not be improved, and looked up with, "Is this right?" The photographer nodded his head, and, presto! in five seconds it was done; and Frau Rutz had really been artist of her own picture. The likeness did her less than justice. Her face is even more like an old Memling portrait than is the picture. Weather-beaten, wrinkled, thin,-as old at forty-five as it should be by rights at sixty,-hers is still a noble and beautiful countenance. Nothing would so surprise Frau Rutz as to be told this. She laughed and shook her head when, on giving her one of the photographs, I said how much I liked it. "If it had another head on it, it might be very good," she said. She is one of the few women in Oberammergau who do delicate carving. In the previous winter she had made thirty vases of this pattern, besides doing much other work.

Very well I came to know Frau Rutz's chiselled and expressive old face before I left Oberammergau. The front door of her house stood always open; and in a tiny kitchen opposite it,-a sort of closet in the middle of the house, lighted only by one small window opening into the hall, and by its door, which was never shut,-she was generally to be seen stirring or skimming, or scouring her bright saucepans. Whenever she saw us, she ran out with a smile, and the inquiry if there was anything she could do for us. On the day before the Passion Play she opened her little shop. It was about the size of a steamboat stateroom, built over a bit of the sidewalk,-Oberammergau fashion,-and joined at a slant to the house; it was a set of shelves roofed over, and with a door to lock at night, not much more: eight people crowded it tight; but it was packed from sill to roof with carvings, a large part of which had been made by herself, her husband and sons, or workmen in their employ, and most of which, I think, were sold by virtue of the Frau's smile, if it proved as potent a lure to other buyers as to me. If I drove or walked past her house without seeing it, I felt as if I had left something behind for which I ought to go back; and when she waved her hand to us, and stood looking after us as our horses dashed round the corner, I felt that good luck was invoked on the drive and the day.

Driving out of Oberammergau, there are two roads to choose from,-one up the Ammer, by way of a higher valley, and into closer knots of mountains, and so on into the Tyrol; the other down the Ammer, through meadows, doubling and climbing some of the outpost mountains of the range, and so on out to the plains. On the first road lies Ettal, and on the other Unterammergau, both within so short a distance of Oberammergau that they are to be counted in among its pleasures.

Ettal is one of the twelve beautiful houses which the ecclesiastics formerly owned in this part of Bavaria. These old monks had a quick eye for beauty of landscape, as well as a shrewd one for all other advantages of locality; and in the days of their power and prosperity they so crowded into these South Bavarian highlands that the region came to be called "Pfaffenwinkel," or "The Priest's Corner." Abbeys, priories, and convents-a dozen of them, all rich and powerful-stood within a day's journey of one another. Of these, Ettal was pre-eminent for beauty and splendor. It was founded early in the fourteenth century by a German emperor, who, being ill, was ready to promise anything to be well again, and being approached at this moment by a crafty Benedictine, promised to found a Benedictine monastery in the valley of the Ammer, if the Holy Virgin would restore him to health. An old tradition says that as the emperor came riding up the steep Ettaler Berg, at the summit of which the monastery stands, his horse fell three times on his knees, and refused to go farther. This was construed to be a sign from heaven to point out the site of the monastery. But to all unforewarned travellers who have approached Oberammergau by way of Ettal, and been compelled to walk up the Ettaler Berg, there will seem small occasion for any suggestion of a supernatural cause for the emperor's horse tumbling on his knees. A more unmitigated two miles of severe climb was never built into a road; the marvel is that it should have occurred to mortal man to do it, and that there is as yet but one votive tablet by the roadside in commemoration of death by apoplexy in the attempt to walk up. It was Alois Pfaurler who did thus die in July, 1866,-and before he was half-way up, too. Therefore this tablet on the spot of his death has a depressing effect on people for the latter half of their struggle, and no doubt makes them go slower.

How much the Benedictines of Ettal had to do with the Passion Play which has made Oberammergau so famous, it is now not possible to know. Those who know most about it disagree. In 1634, the year in which the play was first performed, it is certain that the Oberammergau community must have been under the pastoral charge of some one of the great ecclesiastical establishments in that region; and it is more than probable that the monks, who were themselves much in the way of writing and performing in religious plays, first suggested to the villagers this mode of working for the glory and profit of the Church.

Their venerable pastor, Daisenberger, to whom they owe the present version of the Passion Play, was an Ettal monk; and one of the many plays which he has arranged or written for their dramatic training is "The Founding of the Monastery of Ettal." The closing stanzas of this well express the feeling of the Oberammergauer to-day, and no doubt of the Ettal monk centuries ago, in regard to the incomparable Ammer Thal region:-

"Let God be praised! He hath this vale created

To show to man the glory of his name!

And these wide hills the Lord hath consecrated

Where he his love incessant may proclaim.

"Ne'er shall decay the valley's greatest treasure,

Madonna, thou the pledge of Heaven's grace!

Her blessings will the Queen of Heaven outmeasure

To her quiet Ettal and Bavaria's race."

Most travellers who visit Oberammergau know nothing of Unterammergau, except that the white and brown lines of its roofs and spires make a charming dotted picture on the Ammer meadows, as seen from the higher seats in the Passion Play theatre. The little hamlet is not talked about, not even in guide-books. It sits, a sort of Cinderella, and meekly does its best to take care of the strangers who come grumbling to sleep there, once in ten years, only because beds are not to be had in its more favored sister village farther up the stream. Yet it is no less picturesque, and a good deal cleaner, than is Oberammergau; gets hours more of sunshine, a freer sweep of wind, and has compassing it about a fine stretch of meadow-lands, beautiful to look at, and rich to reap.

Its houses are, like those in Oberammergau, chiefly white stucco over stone, or else dark and painted wood, often the lower story of white stucco and the upper one of dark wood, with a fringe of balconies, dried herbs, and wood-piles where the two stories join. Many of the stuccoed houses are gay with Scripture frescos, more than one hundred years old, and not faded yet. There are also many of the curious ancient windows, made of tiny round panes set in lead. When these are broken, square panes have to be set in. Nobody can make the round ones any more. On the inside of the brown wooden shutters are paintings of bright flowers; over the windows, and above the doors, are also Scripture frescos. One old house is covered with them. One scene is Saint Francis lying on his back, with his cross by his side; and another, the coronation of the Virgin Mary, in which God the Father is represented as a venerable man wrapped in a red and yellow robe, with a long white beard, resting his hand on the round globe, while Christ, in a red mantle, is putting the crown on the head of Mary, who is resplendent in bright blue and red. On another wall is Saint Joseph, holding the infant Christ on his knee. There must have been a marvellous secret in the coloring of these old frescos, that they have so long withstood the snows, rains, and winds of the Ammer valley. The greater part of them were painted by one Franz Zwink, in the middle of the last century. The peasants called him the "wind painter," because he worked with such preternatural rapidity. Many legends attest this; among others, a droll one of his finding a woman at her churning one day and asking her for some butter. She refused. "If you'll give me that butter," said Zwink, "I'll paint a Mother of God for you above your door." "Very well; it is a bargain," said the woman, "provided the picture is done as soon as the butter," whereupon Zwink mounted to the wall, and, his brushes flying as fast as her churn dasher, lo! when the butter was done, there shone out the fresh Madonna over the door, and the butter had been fairly earned. Zwink was an athletic fellow, and walked as swiftly as he painted; gay, moreover, for there is a tradition of his having run all the way to Munich once for a dance. Being too poor to hire a horse, he ran thither in one day, danced all night, and the next day ran back to Oberammergau, fresh and merry. He was originally only a color-rubber in the studio of one of the old rococo painters; but certain it is that he either stole or invented a most triumphant system of coloring, whose secret is unknown to-day. It is said that in 1790 every house in both Ober and Unter Ammergau was painted in this way. But repeated fires have destroyed many of the most valuable frescos, and many others have been ruthlessly covered up by whitewash. An old history of the valley says that when the inhabitants saw flames consuming these sacred images, they wept aloud in terror and grief, not so much for the loss of their dwellings as for the irreparable loss of the guardian pictures. The effect of these on a race for three generations,-one after another growing up in the habit, from earliest infancy, of gazing on the visible representations of God and Christ and the Mother of God, placed as if in token of perpetual presence and protection on the very walls and roofs of their homes-must be incalculably great. Such a people would be religious by nature, as inherently and organically as they were hardy of frame by reason of the stern necessities of their existence. It is a poor proof of the superiority of enlightened, emancipated, and cultivated intellect, with all its fine analyses of what God is not, if it tends to hold in scorn or dares to hold in pity the ignorance which is yet so full of spirituality that it believes it can even see what God is, and feels safer by night and day with a cross at each gable of the roof.

One of the Unterammergau women, seeing me closely studying the frescos on her house, asked me to come in, and with half-shy hospitality, and a sort of childlike glee at my interest, showed me every room. The house is one of some note, as note is reckoned in Unterammergau: it was built in 1700, is well covered with Zwink's frescos, and bears an inscription stating that it was the birthplace of one "Max Anrich, canon of St. Zeno." It is the dwelling now of only humble people, but has traces of better days in the square-blocked wooden ceilings and curious old gayly-painted cupboards. Around three sides of the living-room ran a wooden bench, which made chairs a superfluous luxury. In one corner, on a raised stone platform, stood a square stove, surrounded by a broad bench; two steps led up to this bench, and from the bench, two steps more to the lower round of a ladder-like stair leading to the chamber overhead. The kitchen had a brick floor, worn and sunken in hollows; the stove was raised up on a high stone platform, with a similar bench around it, and the woman explained that to sit on this bench with your back to the fire was a very good thing to do in winter. Every nook, every utensil, was shining clean. In one corner stood a great box full of whetstones, scythe-sharpeners; the making of these was the industry by which the brothers earned the most of their money, she said; surely very little money, then, must come into the house. There were four brothers, three sisters, and the old mother, who sat at a window smiling foolishly all the time, aged, imbecile, but very happy. As we drove away, one of the sisters came running with a few little blossoms she had picked from her balcony; she halted, disappointed, and too shy to offer them, but her whole face lighted up with pleasure as I ordered the driver to halt that I might take her gift. She little knew that I was thinking how much the hospitality of her people shamed the cold indifference of so-called finer breeding.

A few rods on, we came to a barn, in whose open doorway stood two women threshing wheat with ringing flails. Red handkerchiefs twisted tight round their heads and down to their eyebrows, barefooted, bare-legged, bare-armed to the shoulders, swinging their flails lustily, and laughing as they saw me stop my horses to have a better look at them; they made one of the vividest pictures I saw in the Ammer valley. Women often are hired there for this work of threshing, and they are expected to swing flails with that lusty stroke all day long for one mark.

THE PASSION PLAY AT OBERAMMERGAU.

The stir the Passion Play brings does not begin in Oberammergau till the Friday afternoon before the Sabbath of the play. Then, gradually, as a hum begins and swells in a disturbed hive of bees, begins and swells the bustle of the incoming of strangers into the little place. By sunset the crooked lanes and streets are swarming with people who have all fancied they were coming in good season before the crowd. The open space in front of George Lang's house was a scene for a painter as the sun went down on Friday, Sept. 5, 1880. The village herd of cows was straggling past on its easy homeward way, the fifty bells tinkling even more sleepily than in the morning; a little goat-herd, with bright brown eyes, and bright brown partridge feathers in his hat, was worrying his little flock of goats along in the jam; vehicles of all sorts,-einspanners, diligences, landaus,-all pulling, twisting, turning, despairing, were trying to go the drivers did not know where, and were asking the way helplessly of each other. To heighten the confusion, a load of hay upset in the middle of the crowd. Twenty shoulders were under it in a twinkling, and the cart was rolled on, limping, on three wheels, friendly hands holding up the corner. Thirty-four vehicles, one after another, halted in front of George Lang's door. Out of many of them the occupants jumped confidently, looking much satisfied at sight of so comfortable a house, and presenting little slips of white paper consigning them to Mr. Lang's care. Much crestfallen, they re-entered their vehicles, to be driven to the quarters reserved for them elsewhere. Some argued; some grumbled; some entreated: all in vain. The decrees of the house of Lang are like those of the Medes and Persians.

It was long after midnight before the sound of wheels and voices and the cracks of postilions' whips ceased under my windows; and it began again before daylight the next morning. All was hurry and stir,-crowds going to the early mass; still greater crowds, with anxious faces, besieging the doors of the building where were to be issued the numbered tickets for seats at the Play; more crowds coming in, chiefly pedestrians; peasant men and women in all varieties and colors of costume; Englishmen in natty travelling-clothes, with white veils streaming from their hats; Roman Catholic priests in squads, their square-brimmed hats and high black coats white with dust. Eager, intent, swift, by hundreds and hundreds they poured in. Without seeing it, one can never realize what a spectacle is produced by this rushing in of six thousand people into a little town in the space of thirty-six hours. There can be nothing like it except in the movements of armies. Being in the streets was like being in a chorus or village-fair scene on an opera stage a mile big, and crowded full from corner to corner. The only thing to do was to abandon one's self to currents, like a ship afloat, and drift, now down this street and now down that, now whirl into an eddy and come to a stop, and now hurry purposelessly on, just as the preponderating push might determine. Mingled up in it all, in everybody's way and under all the horses' feet, were dozens of little mites of Oberammergauers, looking five, six, seven years of age, like lost children, offering for sale "books of the Passion Play." Every creature above the age of an infant is busy at this time in other ways in Oberammergau; so it is left for the babies to hawk the librettos round the streets, and very shrewdly they do it. Little tots that are trusted with only one book at a time,-all they can carry,-as soon as it is sold, grab the pennies in chubby hands and toddle home after another.

As the day wore on, the crowd and the hum of it increased into a jam and a racket. By four o'clock it was a din of wheels, cracking whips, and postilions' cries. Great diligences, loaded down till they squeaked and groaned on their axles; hay-wagons of all sizes, rigged with white cloth stretched on poles for a cover, and rough planks fastened to the sides for seats, came in procession, all packed with the country people; hundreds of shabby einspanners, bringing two or three, and sometimes a fourth holding on behind with dangling feet; fine travelling-carriages of rich people, their postilions decked in blue and silver, with shining black hats, and brass horns swung over their shoulders by green and white cords and tassels,-on they came into the twist and tangle, making it worse, minute by minute.

Most remarkable among all the remarkable costumes to be seen was that of an old woman from Dachau. She was only a peasant, but she was a peasant of some estate and degree. She had come as escort and maid for four young women belonging to a Roman Catholic institution, and wearing its plain uniform. The contrast between the young ladies' conventional garb of black and white and the blazing toilet of their guide and protector was ludicrous. She wore a jacket of brocade stiff with red, green, and silver embroidery; the sleeves puffed out big at the shoulder, straight and tight below to the wrist. It came down behind only a little lower than her shoulder-blades, and it was open in front from the throat to the waist-belt, showing beneath a solid mass of gold and silver braid. Nine enormous silver buttons were sewed on each side the fronts; a scarf of soft black silk was fastened tight round her throat by a superb silver ornament, all twists and chains and disks. Her black woollen petticoat was laid in small, close flutings, straight from belt to hem, edged with scarlet, and apparently was stiff enough to stand alone. It was held out from her body, just below the belt, by a stiff rope coil underneath it, making a tight, hard, round ridge just below her waist, and nearly doubling her apparent size. All the women in Dachau must be as "thick" as that, she said; and "lovers must have long arms to reach round them!" The jacket, petticoat, and scarf, and all her ornaments, had belonged to her grandmother. What a comment on the quality of the fabrics and the perpetuity of a fashion! She was as elegant to-day as her ancestor had been nearly a century before her. On her head she wore a structure of brocaded black ribbon, built up into high projecting horns or towers, and floating in streamers behind. As she herself was nearly six feet tall, this shining brocade fortress on the top of her head moved about above the heads of the crowd like something carried aloft for show in a procession.

Another interesting sight was the peasants who had come bringing edelweiss and blue gentians to sell,-great bunches of the lovely dark blue chalices, drooping a little, but wonderfully fresh to have come two days, or even three, from home; the edelweiss blossoms were there by sheaves, and ten pfennigs a flower seemed none too much to pay to a man who had climbed among dangerous glaciers to pick it, and had walked three whole days to bring it to market.

The very poor people, who had walked, were the most interesting. They came in groups, evidently families, two women to one man; carrying their provisions in baskets, bundles, or knapsacks; worn and haggard with dust and fatigue, but wearing a noticeable look of earnestness, almost of exaltation. Many of them had walked forty or fifty miles; they had brought only black bread to eat; they would sleep the two nights on hay in some barn,-those of them who had had the great good fortune to secure such a luxury; the rest-and that meant hundreds-would sit on the ground anywhere where they could find a spot clear and a rest for their heads; and after two nights and a day of this, they trudged back again their forty miles or fifty, refreshed, glad, and satisfied for the rest of their lives. This is what the Passion Play means to the devout, ignorant Catholic peasant of Bavaria to-day, and this is what it has meant to his race for hundreds of years.

The antagonism and enlightenment of the Reformation did not reach the Bavarian peasant,-did not so much as disturb his reverence for the tangible tokens and presentations of his religion. He did not so much as know when miracle plays were cast out and forbidden in other countries. But it was sixty-one years later than this that the Oberammergau people, stricken with terror at a plague in their village, knew no better device to stay it than to vow to God the performance of a Play of the Divine Passion of Christ. It is as holy a thing to the masses of them now as it was then; and no one can do justice to the play, even as a dramatic spectacle, who does not look at it with recognition of this fact.

The early history of the Play itself is not known. The oldest text-book of it now extant bears the date 1662,-nearly a generation later than the first performance of it in Oberammergau. This manuscript is still in possession of the Lang family, and is greatly amusing in parts. The prologue gives an account of the New Testament plan of salvation, and exhorts all people to avail themselves of it with gratitude and devotion. At this juncture in rushes a demon messenger from the devil, bearing a letter, which he unfolds and reads. In this letter the devil requests all the people not to yield to the influence of this play, asks them to make all the discordant noises they can while it is going on, and promises to reward them well if they will do so. The letter is signed: "I, Lucifer, Dog of Hell, in my hellish house, where the fire pours out of the windows." The demon, having read the letter aloud, folds it up and addresses the audience, saying: "Now you have heard what my master wishes. He is a very good master, and will reward you! Hie, Devil! up and away!" with which he leaps off the stage, and the play at once begins, opening with a scene laid in Bethany,-a meeting between Christ and his disciples. These grotesque fancies, quips, and cranks were gradually banished from the Play. Every year it was more or less altered, priest after priest revising or rewriting it, down to the time of the now venerable Daisenberger, who spent his youth in the monastery of Ettal, and first saw the Passion Play acted at Oberammergau in 1830.

In 1845 the Oberammergau people, in unanimous enthusiasm, demanded to have Daisenberger appointed as their pastor. He at once identified himself warmly with the dramatic as well as the spiritual life of the community; and it is to his learning and skill that the final admirable form of the Passion Play, and the villagers' wonderful success in rendering it, are due. He has written many Biblical dramas and historical plays founded on incidents in the history of Bavaria. Chief among these are: "The Founding of the Monastery of Ettal," "Theolinda," "King Heinrich and Duke Arnold of Bavaria," "Otto Von Wittelsbach at the Veronese Hermitage," "The Bavarians in the Peasants' War," "Luitberge, Duchess of Bavaria." He has also dramatized some of the legends of the saints, and has translated the "Antigone" of Sophocles and arranged it for the Oberammergau stage. A half-century's training under the guidance of so learned and dramatic a writer, who added to his learning and fine dramatic faculty a profound spirituality and passionate adherence to the faiths and dogmas of the Church, might well create, in a simple religious community, a capacity and a fervor even greater than have been shown by the Oberammergau people. To understand the extent and the method of their attainment, it is needful to realize all this; but no amount of study of the details of the long process can fully convey or set forth the subtle influences which must have pervaded the very air of the place during these years. The acting of plays has been not only the one recreation of their life, otherwise hard-worked, sombre, and stern,-it has been their one channel for the two greatest passions of the human heart,-love of approbation and the instinct of religious worship; for the Oberammergau peasant, both these passions have centred on and in his chance to win fame, please his priest, and honor God, by playing well some worthy part in the Passion Play. The hope and the ambition for this have been the earliest emotions roused in the Oberammergau child's breast. In the tableaux of the Play even very young children take part, and it is said that it has always been the reward held up to them as soon as they could know what the words meant: "If thou art good, thou mayest possibly have the honor of being selected to play in the Passion Play when the year comes round." Not to be considered fit to take any part in the Play is held, in Oberammergau, to be disgrace; while to be regarded as worthy to render the part of the Christus is the greatest honor which a man can receive in this world. To take away from an actor a part he has once played is a shame that can hardly be borne; and it is on record that once a man to whom this had happened sank into a melancholy which became madness.

When the time approaches for the choice of the actors and the assignment of the parts, the whole village is in a turmoil. The selections and assignments are made by a committee of forty-five, presided over by the priest and by the venerable "Geistlicher Rath" Daisenberger, who, now in his eightieth year, still takes the keenest interest in all the dramatic performances of his pupils. The election day is in the last week of December of the year before the Play; and the members of the committee, before going to this meeting, attend a mass in the church. The deciding as to the players for 1880 took three days' time, and great heart-burnings were experienced in the community. In regard to the half-dozen prominent parts there is rarely much disagreement; but as there are some seven hundred actors required for the Play, there must inevitably be antagonisms and jealousies among the minor characters. However, when the result of the discussions and votes of the committee is made public, all dissension ceases. One of the older actors is appointed to take charge of the rehearsals, and from his authority there is no appeal. Each player is required to rehearse his part four times a week; and as early in the spring as the snow is out of the theatre the final rehearsals begin. Thus each Passion Play year is a year of very hard work for the Oberammergauers. Except for their constant familiarity with stage routine and unbroken habit of stage representation through the intervening years, they would never be able to endure the strain of the Passion Play summers; and as it is, they look wan and worn before the season is ended.

It is a thankless return that they have received at the hands of some travellers, who have seen in the Passion Play little more than a show of mountebanks acting for money. The truth is that the individual performers receive an incredibly small share of the profits of the Play. There is not another village in the world whose members would work so hard, and at so great personal sacrifice, for the good of their community and their Church. Every dollar of the money received goes into the hands of a committee selected by the people. After all the costs are paid, the profits are divided into four portions: one quarter is set aside to be expended for the Church, for the school, and for the poor; another for the improvement of the village, for repairs of highways, public buildings, etc.; a third is divided among the tax-paying citizens of the town who have incurred the expense of preparing for the Play, buying the costumes, etc. The remaining quarter is apportioned among the players, according to the importance of their respective parts; as there are seven hundred of them, it is easy to see that the individual gains cannot be very great.

The music of the Play, as now performed, was written in 1814, by Rochus Dedler, an Oberammergau schoolmaster. It has for many years been made a sine qua non of this position in Oberammergau that the master must be a musician, and, if possible, a composer; and Dedler is not the only composer who has been content in the humble position of schoolmaster in this village of peasants. Every day the children are drilled in chorus singing and in recitative; with masses and other church music they are early made familiar. Thus is every avenue of training made to minister to the development of material for the perfection of the Passion Play.

Dedler is said to have been a man of almost inspired nature. He wrote often by night, and with preternatural rapidity. The music of the Passion Play was begun on the evening of Trinity Sunday; he called his six children together, made them kneel in a circle around him, and saying, "Now I begin," ordered them all to devote themselves to earnest prayer for him that he might write music worthy of the good themes of the Play. The last notes were written on the following Christmas Day, and they are indeed worthy of the story for which they are at once the expression and the setting. The harmonies are dignified, simple, and tender, with movements at times much resembling some of Mozart's Masses. Many of the chorals are full of solemn beauty. A daughter of Dedler's is still living in Munich; and to her the grateful and honest-minded Oberammergau people have sent, after each performance of the Passion Play, a sum of money in token of their sense of indebtedness to her father's work.

The Passion Play cannot be considered solely as a drama; neither is it to be considered simply as a historical panorama, presenting the salient points in the earthly career of Jesus called Christ. To consider it in either of these ways, or to behold it in the spirit born of either of these two views, is to do only partial justice to it. Whatever there might have been in the beginning of theatrical show and diversion and fantastic conceit about it, has been long ago eliminated. Generation after generation of devout and holy men have looked upon it more and more as a vehicle for the profoundest truths of their religion, and have added to it, scene by scene, speech by speech, everything which in their esteem could enhance its solemnity and make clear its teaching. However much one may disagree with its doctrines, reject its assumptions, or question its interpretations, that is no reason for overlooking its significance as a tangible and rounded presentation of that scheme of the redemption of the world in which to-day millions of men and women have full faith. It is by no means distinctively a Roman Catholic presentation of this scheme; it is Christian. The Holy Virgin of the Roman Catholic Church is, in this play, from first to last, only the mother of Jesus,-the mother whom all lovers and followers of Jesus, wherever they place him or her, however they define his nature and her relations to him, yet hold blessed among the women who have given birth to leaders and saviors of men.

This presentation of the scheme of redemption seeks to portray not only the scenes of the life of Jesus on earth, but the typical foreshadowing of it in the Old Testament narratives,-its prophecy as well as its fulfilment. To this end there are given, before each act of the Play, tableaux of Old Testament events, supposed to be directly typical, and intended to be prophetic, of the scenes in Christ's life which are depicted in the act following. These are selected with skill, and rendered with marvellous effect. For instance, a tableau of the plotting of Joseph's brethren to sell him into Egypt, is given before the act in which the Jewish priests in the full council of the Sanhedrim plot the death of Jesus; a tableau of the miraculous fall of manna for the Israelites in the wilderness, before the act in which is given Christ's Last Supper with his Disciples; the sale of Joseph to the Midianites before the bargain of Judas with the priests for the betrayal of Jesus; the death of Abel, and Cain's despair, before the act in which Judas, driven mad by remorse, throws down at the feet of the priests the "price of blood," and rushes out to hang himself; Daniel defending himself to Darius, before the act in which Jesus is brought into the presence of Pilate for trial; the sacrifice of Isaac, before the scourging of Jesus and his crowning with the thorns: these are a few of the best and most relevant ones.

The Play is divided into eighteen acts, and covers the time from Christ's entry into Jerusalem at the time of his driving the money-changers out of the temple till his ascension. The salient points, both historical and graphic, are admirably chosen for a continuous representation. In the second act is seen the High Council of the Jewish Sanhedrim plotting measures for the ruin and death of Jesus. This is followed by his Departure from Bethany, the Last Journey to Jerusalem, the Last Supper, the Final Interview between Judas and the Sanhedrim, the Betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The performance of the Play up to this point consumes four hours; and as there is here a natural break in the action, an interval of an hour's rest is taken. It comes none too soon, either to actors or spectators, after so long a strain of unbroken attention and deep emotion.

The next act is the bringing of Jesus before the High-Priest Annas; Annas orders him taken before Caiaphas, and this is the ninth act of the Play. Then follow: The Despair of Judas and his Bitter Reproaches to the Sanhedrim, The Interview between Jesus and Pilate, His Appearance before Herod, His Scourging and Crowning with Thorns, The Pronouncing of his Death Sentence by Pilate, The Ascent to Golgotha, The Crucifixion and Burial, The Resurrection and Ascension. The whole lesson of Christ's life, the whole lesson of Christ's death, are thus shown, taught, impressed with a vividness which one must be callous not to feel. The quality or condition of mind which can remain to the end either unmoved or antagonistic is not to be envied. But, setting aside all and every consideration of the moral quality of the Play, looking at it simply as a dramatic spectacle, as a matter of acting, of pictorial effects, it is impossible to deny to it a place among the masterly theatrical representations of the world. One's natural incredulity as to the possibility of true dramatic skill on the part of comparatively unlettered peasants melts and disappears at sight of the first act, The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem.

The stage, open to the sky, with a background so ingeniously arranged as to give a good representation of several streets of the city, is crowded in a few moments by five hundred men and women and children, all waving palm branches, singing hosannas, and crowding around the central figure of Jesus riding on an ass. The verisimilitude of the scene is bewildering. The splendor of the colors is dazzling. Watching this crowd of five hundred actors closely, one finds not a single man, woman, or little child performing his part mechanically or absently. The whole five hundred are acting as if each one regarded his part as the central and prominent one; in fact, they are so acting that it does not seem acting: this is characteristic of the acting throughout the play. There is not a moment's slighting or tameness anywhere. The most insignificant part is rendered as honestly as the most important, and with the same abandon and fervor. There are myriads of little by-plays and touches, which one hardly recognizes in the first seeing of it, the interest is so intense and the movement so rapid; but, seeing it a second time, one is almost more impressed by these perfections in minor points than by the rendering of the chief parts. The scribes who sit quietly writing in the foreground of the Sanhedrim Court; the disciples who have nothing to do but to appear to listen while Jesus speaks; the money-changers picking up their coins; the messengers who come with only a word or two to speak; the soldiers drawing lots among themselves in a group for Jesus' garments, at a moment when all attention might be supposed to be concentrated on the central figures of the Crucifixion,-every one of these acts with an enthusiasm and absorption only to be explained by the mingling of a certain element of religious fervor with native and long-trained dramatic instinct.

This dramatic instinct is shown almost as much in the tableaux as in the acting. The poses and grouping are wonderful, and the power of remaining a long time motionless is certainly a trait which the Oberammergau people possess to a well-nigh superhuman extent. The curtain remained up, during many of these tableaux, five and seven minutes; and there was not a trace of unsteadiness to be seen in one of the characters. Even through a powerful glass I could not detect so much as the twitching of a muscle. This is especially noticeable in the tableau of the Fall of Manna in the Wilderness, which is one of the finest of the Play. There are in it more than four hundred persons; one hundred and fifty of them are children, some not over three years of age. These children are conspicuously grouped in the foreground; many of them are in attitudes which must be difficult to keep,-bent on one knee or with outstretched hand or with uplifted face,-but not one of the little creatures stirs head or foot or eye. Neither is there to be seen, as the curtain begins to fall, any tremor of preparation to move. Motionless as death they stand till the curtain shuts even their feet from view. Too much praise cannot be bestowed on the fidelity, accuracy, and beauty of the costumes. They are gorgeous in color and fabric, and have been studied carefully from the best authorities extant, and are not the least among the surprises which the Play affords to all who go to see it expecting it to be on the plane of ordinary theatrical representations. The splendor of some of the more crowded scenes is rarely equalled: such a combination of severe simplicity of outlines and contours, classic models of drapery, with brilliancy of coloring, is not to be seen in any other play now acted.

The high-water mark of the acting in the Play seems to me to be reached, not in the Christus, but by Judas. This part is played by an old man, Gregory Lechner. He is over sixty years of age, and his snowy beard and his hair have to be dyed to the red hue which is desired for the crafty Judas's face. From the time when, in Simon's house, he stands by, grumbling at the waste of the precious ointment poured by Mary Magdalene on the feet of Jesus, to the last moment of his wretched existence, when he is seen wandering in a desolate wilderness, about to take his own life in his remorse and despair, Judas' acting is superb. Face, attitudes, voice, action,-all are grandly true to the character, and marvellously full of life. It would be considered splendid acting on any stage in the world. Nothing could surpass its subtlety and fineness of conception, or the fire of its rendering. It is a conception quite unlike those ordinarily held of the character of Judas; ascribes the betrayal neither to a wilful, malignant treachery, nor, as is sometimes done, to a secret purpose of forcing Jesus to vindicate his claims to divine nature by working a miracle of discomfiture to his enemies, but to pure, unrestrained avarice,-the deadliest passion which can get possession of the human soul. This theory is tenable at every point of Judas' career as recorded in the Bible, and affords far broader scope for dramatic delineation than any other theory of his character and conduct. It is, in fact, the only theory which seems compatible with the entire belief in the supernatural nature of Jesus. Expecting up to the last minute that supernatural agencies would hinder the accomplishment of the Jews' utmost malice, he thought to realize the full benefit of the price of the betrayal, and yet not seriously imperil either the ultimate ends or the personal safety of Jesus. The struggle between the insatiable demon of avarice in his heart and all the nobler impulses restraining it is a struggle which is to be seen going on in his thoughts and repeated in his face in every scene in which he appears; and his final despair and remorse are but the natural culmination of the deed which he did only under the temporary control of a passion against which he was all the time struggling, and which he himself held in detestation and scorn. The gesture and look with which he at last flings down the bag of silver in the presence of the assembled Sanhedrim, exclaiming,-

"Ye have made me a betrayer!

Release again the innocent One! My

Hands shall be clean,"

are a triumph of dramatic art never to be forgotten. His last words as he wanders distraught in the dark wastes among barren trees, are one of the finest monologues of the Play. It was written by the priest Daisenberger.

"Oh, were the Master there! Oh, could I see

His face once more! I'd cast me at his feet,

And cling to him, my only saving hope.

But now he lieth in prison,-is, perhaps,

Already murdered by his raging foe,-

Alas, through my own guilt, through my own guilt!

I am the outcast villain who hath brought

My benefactor to these bonds and death!

The scum of men! There is no help for me!

For me no hope! My crime is much too great!

The tearful crime no penance can make good!

Too late! Too late! For he is dead-and I-

I am his murderer!

Thrice unhappy hour

In which my mother gave me to the world!

How long must I drag on this life of shame,

And bear these tortures in my outcast breast?

As one pest-stricken, flee the haunts of men,

And be despised and shunned by all the world?

Not one step farther! Here, O life accursed,-

Here will I end thee!"

The character of Christ is, of necessity, far the most difficult part in the Play. Looking at it either as a rendering of the supernatural or a portraying of the human Christ, there is apparent at once the well-nigh insurmountable difficulty in the way of actualizing it in any man's conception. Only the very profoundest religious fervor could carry any man through the effort of embodying it on the theory of Christ's divinity; and no amount of atheistic indifference could carry a man through the ghastly mockery of acting it on any other theory. Joseph Maier, who played the part in 1870, 1871, and 1880, is one of the best-skilled carvers in the village, and, it is said, has never carved anything but figures of Christ. He is a man of gentle and religious nature, and is, as any devout Oberammergauer would be, deeply pervaded by a sense of the solemnity of the function he performs in the Play. In the main, he acts the part with wonderful dignity and pathos. The only drawback is a certain undercurrent of self-consciousness which seems ever apparent in him. Perhaps this is only one of the limitations inevitably resulting from the over-demand which the part, once being accepted and regarded as a supernatural one, must perforce make on human powers. The dignity and dramatic unity of the Play are much heightened by the admirable manner in which a chorus is introduced, somewhat like the chorus of the old Greek plays. It consists of eighteen singers, with a leader styled the Choragus. The appearance and functions of these Schutzgeister, or guardian angels, as they are called, has been thus admirably described by a writer who has given the best detailed account ever written of the Passion Play:-

"They have dresses of various colors, over which a white tunic with gold fringe and a colored mantle are worn. Their appearance on the stage is majestic and solemn. They advance from the recesses on either side of the proscenium, and take up their position across the whole extent of the theatre, forming a slightly concave line. After the chorus has assumed its position, the choragus gives out in a dramatic manner the opening address or prologue which introduces each act; the tone is immediately taken up by the whole chorus, which continues either in solo, alternately, or in chorus, until the curtain is raised in order to reveal a tableau vivant. At this moment the choragus retires a few steps backward, and forms with one half of the band a division on the left of the stage, while the other half withdraws in like manner to the right. They thus leave the centre of the stage completely free, and the spectators have a full view of the tableau thus revealed. A few seconds having been granted for the contemplation of this picture, made more solemn by the musical recitation of the expounders, the curtain falls again, and the two divisions of the chorus coming forward resume their first position, and present a front to the audience, observing the same grace in all their motions as when they parted. The chanting still continues, and points out the connection between the picture which has just vanished and the dramatic scene which is forthwith to succeed. The singers then make their exit. The task of these Spirit-singers is resumed in the few following points: They have to prepare the audience for the approaching scenes. While gratifying the ear by delicious harmonies, they explain and interpret the relation which shadow bears to substance,-the connection between the type and its fulfilment. And as their name implies, they must be ever present as guardian spirits, as heavenly monitors, during the entire performance. The addresses of the choragus are all written by the Geistlicher Rath Daisenberger. They are written in the form of the ancient strophe and anti-strophe, with the difference that while in the Greek theatre they were spoken by the different members of the chorus, they are delivered in the Passion Play by the choragus alone."

It is impossible for any description, however accurate and minute, to give a just idea of the effects produced by this chorus. The handling of it is perhaps the one thing which, more than any other, lifts the play to its high plane of dignity and beauty. The costumes are brilliant in color, and strictly classic in contour,-a full white tunic, edged with gold at hem and at throat, and simply confined at the waist by a loose girdle. Over these are worn flowing mantles of either pale blue, crimson, dull red, grayish purple, green, or scarlet. These mantles or robes are held in place carelessly by a band of gold across the breast. Crowns or tiaras of gold on the head complete the dress, which, for simplicity and grace of outline and beauty of coloring, could not be surpassed. The rhythmic precision with which the singers enter, take place, open their lines, and fall back on the right and left, is a marvel, until one learns that a diagram of their movement is marked out on the floor, and that the mysterious exactness and uniformity of their positions are simply the result of following each time the constantly marked lines on the stage. Their motions are slow and solemn, their expressions exalted and rapt; they also are actors in the grand scheme of the Play.

On the morning of the Play the whole village is astir before light; in fact, the village proper can hardly be said to have slept at all, for seven hundred out of its twelve hundred inhabitants are actors in the play, and are to be ready to attend a solemn mass at daylight.

Before eight o'clock every seat in the theatre is filled. There is no confusion, no noise. The proportion of those who have come to the play with as solemn a feeling as they would have followed the steps of the living Christ in Jud?a is so large that the contagion of their devout atmosphere spreads even to the most indifferent spectators, commanding quiet and serious demeanor.

The firing of a cannon announces the moment of beginning. Slow, swelling strains come from the orchestra; the stately chorus enters on the stage; the music stops; the leader gives a few words of prologue or argument, and immediately the chorus breaks into song.

From this moment to the end, eight long hours, with only one hour's rest at noon, the movement of this play is continuous. It is a wonderful instance of endurance on the part of the actors; the stage being entirely uncovered, sun and rain alike beat on their unprotected heads. The greater part of the auditorium also is uncovered, and there have been several instances in which the play has been performed in a violent storm of rain, thousands of spectators sitting drenched from beginning to end of the performance.

How incomparably the effects are, in sunny weather, heightened by this background of mountain and sky, fine distances, and vistas of mountain and meadow, and the canopy of heaven overhead, it is impossible to express; one only wonders, on seeing it, that outdoor theatres have not become a common summer pleasure for the whole world.

When birds fly over, they cast fluttering shadows of their wings on the front of Pilate's and Caiaphas' homes, as naturally as did Jud?an sparrows two thousand years ago. Even butterflies flitting past cast their tiny shadows on the stage; one bird paused, hovered, as if pondering what it all could mean, circled two or three times over the heads of the multitude, and then alighted on one of the wall-posts and watched for some time. Great banks of white cumulus clouds gathered and rested, dissolved and floated away, as the morning grew to noonday, and the noonday wore on toward night. This closeness of Nature is an accessory of illimitable effect; the visible presence of the sky seems a witness to invisible presences beyond it, and a direct bond with them. There must be many a soul, I am sure, who has felt closer to the world of spiritual existences, while listening to the music of the Oberammergau Passion Play, than in any other hour of his life; and who can never, so long as he lives, read without emotion the closing words of the venerable Daisenberger's little "History of Oberammergau:"-

"May the strangers who come to this Holy Passion Play become, by reading this book, more friendly with Ammergau; and may it sometimes, after they have returned to their homes, renew in them the memory of this quiet mountain valley."

* * *

University Press: John Wilson & Son, Cambridge.

Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications.

* * *

RAMONA: A Story.

By HELEN JACKSON (H. H.).

12mo Cloth. Price $1.50

* * *

The Atlantic Monthly says of the author that she is "a Murillo in literature," and that the story "is one of the most artistic creations of American literature." Says a lady: "To me it is the most distinctive piece of work we have had in this country since 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' and its exquisite finish of style is beyond that classic." "The book is truly an American novel," says the Boston Advertiser. "Ramona is one of the most charming creations of modern fiction," says Charles D Warner. "The romance of the story is irresistibly fascinating," says The Independent.

"The best novel written by a woman since George Eliot died, as it seems to me, is Mrs. Jackson's 'Ramona.' What action is there! What motion! How entrainant it is! It carries us along as if mounted on a swift horse's back, from beginning to end, and it is only when we return for a second reading that we can appreciate the fine handling of the characters, and especially the Spanish mother, drawn with a stroke as keen and firm as that which portrayed George Eliot's 'Dorothea.'"-T. W. Higginson.

Unsolicited tribute of a stranger, a lady in Wisconsin:-

"I beg leave to thank you with an intense heartiness for your public espousal of the cause of the Indian. In your 'Century of Dishonor' you showed to the country its own disgrace. In 'Ramona' you have dealt most tenderly with the Indians as men and women. You have shown that their stoicism is not indifference, that their squalor is not always of their own choosing. You have shown the tender grandeur of their love, the endurance of their constancy. While, by 'Ramona,' you have made your name immortal, you have done something which is far greater. You are but one: they are many. You have helped those who cannot help themselves. As a novel, 'Ramona' must stand beside 'Romola,' both as regards literary excellence and the portrayal of life's deepest, most vital, most solemn interests. I think nothing in literature since Goldsmith's 'Vicar of Wakefield' equals your description of the flight of Ramona and Alessandro. Such delicate pathos and tender joy, such pure conception of life's realities, and such loftiness of self-abnegating love! How much richer and happier the world is with 'Ramona' in it!"

* * *

Sold by all booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, by the publishers,

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston

FOOTNOTES

[1] John G. Hittell's Commerce and Industries of the Pacific Coast.

[2]See transcriber's note.

[3] "The term 'pueblo' answers to that of the English word 'town,' in all its vagueness and all its precision. As the word 'town' in English generally embraces every kind of population from the village to the city, and also, used specifically, signifies a town corporate and politic, so the word 'pueblo' in Spanish ranges from the hamlet to the city, but, used emphatically, signifies a town corporate and politic."-Dwinelle's Colonial History of San Francisco.

[4] In the decade between 1801 and 1810 the missions furnished to the presidios about eighteen thousand dollars' worth of supplies each year.

[5] Special Report of the Hon. B. D. Wilson, of Los Angeles, Cal., to the Interior Department in 1852.

[6] The missions of San Rafael and San Francisco de Solano were the last founded; the first in 1819, and the latter in 1823,-too late to attain any great success or importance.

[7] John W. Dwinelle's Colonial History of San Francisco, pp. 44-87.

[8] Longfellow.

[9] Betrothed.