 Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequenton Valleys. The time at length came for leaving Capriol, for leaving Capriol and the Dolomites, and the pleasant, untrodden ways of southeastern Tyrol, and for drifting back again into the overcrowded highways of Italy and Switzerland. We were to re-enter the world at Botson. All roads, perhaps, led to Rome, when the golden milestones stood in the center of the known universe. So too all these central Dolomite valleys and passes may be said to lead, somehow or other, to Botson. We had plenty of routes to choose from. There was the comparatively new Char Road between Monte Latimer and the Rosengarten, known as the Caressa Pass. There was the way by Levina Lungo and the Gator Thal to Bruneck, and the rail from Bruneck to Botson. Again we might follow the long line of the Avicio through the Fassa, Fiamme and Sembre Valleys, to Lavisse, where the torrent meets the Isic, and the road meets the railway, not far from Trent. Or we might make for the Grodner Thal and the Cicer Alp, and strike the Brenner Line at Outswang, a little above Botson. We decided upon the last. It had many advantages over the other routes. It would take us first along the whole valley of Levina Lungo, show us the cella massive from three sides of its vast circumference, carry us to St. Ulrich, which is to South Tyrol in respect of the wood-carving trade, what Interlochen and Breen's are to Switzerland, carry us over the Cicer Alp, close under the shadow of the Langkulfel, the Platt Kogel and the Schlein, give us an opportunity of visiting the baths of Ratzes, and finally land us at Botson in about a week, or even less, from the time of starting. We parted from friends when we parted from the hospitable pezzies, and went away promising ourselves and them to return again soon to Capriol. The morning at five a.m. was cool and bright, but we had already been waiting some days for more favorable weather, and the sky was still unsettled. The church bells were ringing as we rode out of the village, and the usual procession of remonstrance was winding up towards the church. This time they were going to pray for dry weather. Che, Che, said Clementi contemptuously. That is the way they do, Signora. The paroco watches his barometer, and when the rain is near falling, he calls the people together to pray for it. Perhaps it comes down in the middle of the mass. Then he cries, Echo, Iu, Miracolo, and poor devils, they believe it. As far as Finnazor's little inn at Andras, our road lay over-ground already traversed. Then we crossed the torrent, left the valley of Buchenstein, opening away to the right, and skirting now the rising slopes of the Col di Lana, continued our course up the main valley of La Vinolungo. At the large village known indifferently as La Vinolungo and Piav d'Andres, we paused for an hour to feed the mules, and were served with excellent coffee in the cleanest of wooden rooms by the fattest of cheerful landlady's. These people are also Finnazor's, and their opposite neighbors, who likewise keeping in are Finnazor's, which is more the perplexing as the one albergio is really comfortable, and the other of doubtful report. The good one, however, lies to the eastward, that is to say, to the right of a traveler coming up from Capriol. The village, which is the capuolungo and post-down of the district, hangs on the verge of a steep precipice, and stands nearly fifteen hundred feet higher than Capriol. The view from the church terrace is quite magnificent, and not only commands the deep cut course of the Cor de Val from its source at the head of the valley down as far as Capriol, but brings in the Cevita, the Marmalata, the Monte Padon, or Missola, the Sella Massive, and a host of inferior peaks. From Piav d'Andres, as far as Araba, a dismal-looking wooden hamlet at the foot of the slopes below the southeastern precipices of the Sella, the valley rises slowly and steadily. As it rises, it becomes barren and uninteresting. The jagged peaks of Monte Padon, emerging gradually from their hood of sullen clouds, show purpley black against the sky. By and by the winding way having brought us, somehow, in a line with the Valfi Orantino, and higher than the intervening slopes of Monte Frisale, we are greeted with an unexpected view of the Palmo. Shadowy, stately, very distant, it closes the end of an immensely long and glittering vista. We see it for a few moments only and for the last time. As the path trends inward, it vanishes, as the Cevita and the Marmalata have by this time also vanished. We shall see them no more in the course of the present journey, and who can tell when, if ever, we shall see them again. And now the huge Sella takes all the horizon, a pile of thick-set, tawny towers, like half a dozen stumpy Palmos clustered together. The mass seems naturally to divide itself into the five blocks respectively entitled the Boe, or Portois Spitz, closing the head of the Fossathal. The Sella Spitz, looking up the Grodenathal. The Pisa del Spitz, overhanging the Colfaso Pass. The Mesor Spitz, facing Corfara and the Gatorthal. And the Campolungo Spitz, dominating the Campolungo Pass, which we are now approaching. As we strike northwards up the Bear Call to the right, leaving Araba and the Valley of Levinolungo far below, we have these huge impending bastions always upon a left. The trees up here are few and stunted. The Alproses are all off, and only the Bear Bushes remain. The Golden Lilies, the Gentians, the rich wildflowers that made most of the other passes beautiful, are all missing, and only a few scant blossoms of Edelweiss hide themselves here and there among the moss-grown boulders. The mowers are at work, however, on all the slopes, getting in the meager hay harvest and singing at their work. First one voice, then another, takes up the yodel. It is echoed and flung back from side to side of the valley, now dying away, now breaking out again, sweet and liquid and wild as the notes of a bird, which no doubt all these Swiss and Tyrolean melodies were originally imitations. Now, as we near the top of the Call, new mountains come rising on the northern horizon. The Santa Croce, or Heligan Croats, a long mountain terminated towards the west with a couple of twin peaks, like a cathedral with two short spires. The domes shaped Ferella Berg, and the Sass Unger, or Sassander Coffle, which is in reality an outpost of the Gernenzene Massive. Just as we have reached the top of the Pass and begun to descend, a long rumbling peel of distant thunder rolls up from the Levinna Lungoside, and looking back we see the clouds gathering fast at our heels. Down below, in a green, lonely hollow, lies Corforra, consisting of about a dozen houses and a tiny church. The way is steep and soft and slippery. The mules can hardly keep their feet. The storm is coming up. So we hurry and slide and stumble on as quickly as we can, and arrive presently in the midst of thunder and lightning at the door of Ratanera's Alberto. The little hostelry consists of two houses, an old and a new. The new house is reserved for travelers of the better class, and contains neither public room nor kitchen. The family occupy the old house, cook in it, and there entertain the guides and peasant travelers. The new house is made of sweet, fresh, bright pine wood. The upstairs rooms are all wood, floors, walls, and ceilings alike. The ground floor rooms are plastered and whitewashed. Who would have dreamed of finding art in such a place? Who would have dreamed that the grave-old peasant covered with flower-dust, who just now led the mules to the stable, was the father of a young painter of unusual promises? Yet it is so. Franz Ratanera, the son of our host, is an art student at Vienna. The house is full of his sketches. The first thing one sees on going upstairs is a full-length figure of hofer on the wall in colors, life-size, admirably drawn with a banner in his right hand and his rifle slung to his shoulder. In the largest bedroom, one end of which serves for a dining room, hang some capital oil studies of still life, and several clever heads and crayons. And down below, in a sort of lumber room where the wet cloaks are hung to dry, every inch of whitewashed wall is covered with graffiti—heads, arms, hands, caricatures, full-links, half-links, Frederick the Great, Gotha, Schiller, Mignon, Mephistopheles, Hamlet, the torso of the Belvedere, the fighting gladiator, the wild huntsman, and many more than I can remember or enumerate. The pretty little madshin who serves our dinner is never tired of answering questions about Mein Bruder-Nachveen. He painted those two still-life pictures when he was here last summer and the hofer fresco four years ago. He was always drawing from earliest boyhood and studied at Munich before he went to Vienna. He is at home now, came home last night to serve his annual month with the Corfera Rifle Corps, and has just gone over the hill to see friends at some neighboring village. Here in the day, when he returns from over the hill, the young artist at my request pays us a visit. He is not yet five and twenty and is shy as a girl. We talk a little about art, but as Herr Franz is not very strong an Italian and as the writer's German is limited, our aesthetic conversation is necessarily somewhat dislocated. I could gather enough, however, to see that he is all the study industry, the patient ambition, and the deep inward enthusiasm of a German art student, and I believe he is destined to make his mark by and by. CHAPTER XIV. CORFARA is, of course, over the Austrian border, and its people are as thoroughly Austrian as if Campadelo and Capriol were not each within a few hours' journey. Herr Franz is the only member of his family who speaks Italian. Neither old Ratanera, nor his daughter, nor any soul about the village except the priest, understands a syllable of any language but their own. The great surprise of Corfara, however, is its church. It is not wonderful, after all, to find a solitary genius springing up here and there, even in the wildest soil. Not many miles from Titian's birthplace we found the Gueninas. In the valley where Bruce Siltoland was born we came upon the young wood sculptor of Bregoriza. It is not, therefore, so surprising that Corfara should produce its painter. But it is certainly somewhat startling when, having strolled out by and by after the storm has tailed off into a dull drizzle, we peep in at yonder, tiny, humble-looking church and find ourselves in the midst of the most lavish decorations. Here where one would have expected to find only whitewash, our walls covered with intricate medieval diapering, shrines, altars, and tryptics loaded with carved and painted saints, and gorgeous with profuse gilding, stalls, organloft and seats elaborately sculptured, all in the most ornate style of early German Gothic, all apparently new, all blazing with burnished gold and glowing with color. The sight of this splendor is so amazing that for the first few minutes one can only wonder in silence, and that wonder is increased when, happening presently to meet the priest, we learn from him that all these adornments are the work of the peasant population of the place, of those very haymakers whom we heard singing this morning in the hay, designed by them, carved by them, painted by them, gilded by them, and the pious free will offering of their hands. It is a small place, and the inhabitants do not number more than two hundred and sixty or two hundred and seventy souls, children included, but, says the priest, smiling, they are all artists. He is a gentlemanly priest, and expresses himself in very choice Italian. He speaks of corfora in a smiling, well-bred, deprecating way, as a lost, out-of-the-way spot, and of the church, though one would think he must feel proud of it, as pretty for so poor a place. When I praise the decorations he shrugs his shoulders, and implying that better might have been done with larger means. One good thing we have, though, he says, which the senioras have not seen, but which I shall be pleased to show if they do not mind the trouble of returning. So we turn back, this interview having taken place just outside the churchyard gate, and re-entering the church, follow him to the back of the altar, where are a pair of painted doors now folded back out of sight, but brought round to the front, he says, in lent, and closed over the face of the altar. These paintings represent the decoration of St. Catherine, to whom the church is dedicated, and according to the parochial were executed in the fourteenth or fifteenth century by an artist named Tassini, who, as the story goes, and it is always the same story with these village treasures, being detained at Corfara by stress of weather, painted these pictures and presented them to the church in return for the hospitality of the priest. Beyond this our parochial has nothing to tell. He knows no more than I who this Tassini was, when or where he lived or whence he came. No mention of him occurs in the comprehensive volumes of Crowe and Cavalcassell on painting in North Italy, and his works at Corfara obtain not a line of notice in the pages of Ball's Guide, or of M. Gilbert and Churchill's Dolomite Mountains. I, who never even heard of him before, can only judge from the style of his work that he was a North Italian of the Belliniste School. The paintings, which are of course on panel, are executed in a brilliant, crystalline early style, and recall the work of Memling even more than the work of the Frullian painters. The St. Catherine, slender, round-faced, and fair, is quite of the German type, while the exquisite finish of the costumes, the delicate use of the gilding, and the elaborate treatment of patterns and textures remind one of Carlo Crivelli. Four other paintings, also on panel, representing St. Catherine and other saints, adorn the front of the altar. His works, deeper in tone, but evidently belonging to the same period, are supposed by the priest to be by some other hand. At all events they are all interesting, while the larger paintings at the back are unquestionably of rare beauty and value. As we leave the church, two little girls come running after the priest to kiss his hand, an act of homage which he excuses to us in his apologetic smiling way, saying that it is the custom here, and that the children are simple and mean well. Being now come to where the paths diverge, he wishes us a pleasant journey, lifts his little skull-cap with a courtly air, and turns away to his own home, a cheerful-looking white house with smart blinds and pots of flowers in the windows, and a fat poodle sitting at the gate. Returning presently to the inn, just as the drizzle thickens and the light begins to fail, we encounter a phenomenon. It stands in the little yard between the albergue and the des pendants, discoursing and gesticulating in the midst of a group composed of the ratineras, our guides, and a few miscellaneous men and stable boys. It wears hylos, a battered straw hat, and a brown garment, which may be described either as a long kilt or the briefest of petticoats. Its hair is sandy, its complexion crimson, its age anything between forty-five and sixty. It carries a knapsack on its back and an alpin-stock in its hand. The voice is the voice of a man, the face, tanned and travel-stained as it is, is the face of a woman. She is gabbling German, apparently describing her day's tramp across the mountains, and seems highly gratified by the peals of laughter which occasionally interrupt her narrative. A guide, she exclaims, replying to an observation of some bystander. Not I! What do I want with a guide? I have carried my own knapsack and found my own way through France, through England, through Italy, through Palestine. I have never taken a guide, and I have never wanted one. You are all lazy fellows, and I will have nothing to do with you. Fatigue is nothing to me. Distance is nothing to me. Danger is nothing to me. I have been taken by brigands before now. What of that? If I had had a guide with me, would he have fought them? Not a bit of it. He would have run away. Well, I neither fought nor ran away. I made friends of my brigands. I painted all their portraits. I spent a month with them, and we parted the best comrades in the world. Hug! Guides, indeed. All very well for incapable, but not for me. I am afraid of nothing, neither of the pope nor the devil. But startled by this tremendous peroration, we go in and leave her discoursing, and I don't know that I have ever experienced a more lively sense of gratification and relief, than when I presently learned that this lady is a German. She is no stranger, it seems, at Corfara, but appears every now and then in this mad fashion, sometimes putting up at the Ratanarras for several weeks together. She paints, she botanizes, and I think they said she writes. Giuseppe, who describes her as a signora, molto brutte e molto alegra, tells next day how she subbed that night at the Guides' table and entertained them hugely. The way from Corfara to St. Ulrich lies along the Gator Thal, through the village of Colfasco, and up a high and lonely valley between the Gara de Naza and Sela Massives. There was not a living soul in Colfasso as we rode through, nothing but a ghastly, attenuated Christ on a house-side, nearly as large as life, and splashed horribly as if with blood from head to foot. The whole village was out on the hills, the oldest and youngest at work with the strongest getting in the hay. From above Corfara and as far as the top of the pass, our path lay close under the tremendous precipices of that part of the Stella, known as the Prisidus Spitz. The mountain on this side assumes magnificent proportions, preserving always its characteristic likeness to a titanic fortress, and showing now and then, through clefs in those giant ramparts, glimpses of a great snowy plateau within, with here and there a blue fold of downward creeping glacier or a fall of misty cascade. As we mount higher, the last patches of corn and flax give place to a broad, desolate space of boggy turf, intersected by a network of irregular cattle tracks, and scattered over with scores of wooden crosses. These mark where travelers have been found dead. They say at Corfara that this Colfasco call is the most dangerous of all the Dolomite passes, and that the wind in winter rages up here with such fury that it drives the snow and sleet in great clouds which bury and suffocate men in cattle in their progress. There is also no defined path, and the bog is everywhere treacherous. And now the summit reached and passed, the land coffal rises on the left above woods and hilltops, a vast, solitary tower with many pinnacles. A sheltered gorge, thinly wooded with fir trees, opens before us. The long, impending rain begins again, hard and fast, and the path becoming soon too steep for riding, we have to dismount and walk in a pelting storm down a steep mountainside to Santa Maria Gardenia, which is the first hamlet at the head of the Grodener Thal. Here we put up at a tiny austeria till the sky clears again and then push on for St. Ulrich. Our way lies now along the Grodener Thal, green and wooded and sparkling with villages. The cella is gradually left behind. The land coffal becomes more lofty and imposing. The Platte Cogo, like a half-dome, rises into view. The wooded slopes of the Cicer Alps close in the valley on the left, and the schlern, as seen for the first time through a vista of ravine, shows like a steep black wall of rock, flecked here and there with snow. Every last trace of Italy has now vanished. The landscape, the houses, the names and signs above the doors are all German. The peasants we meet on the road are square set, fair, blue-eyed and boorish. The men carry wooden crazen on their backs, as in Switzerland. Unmistakable signs and tokens now begin to tell of the approach to St. Ulrich. The wayside crucifixions are larger, better carved, better painted, and some are picked out with gold. By and by we pass a cottage outside the door of which stands a crate piled high with little wooden horses. In the doorway of another house a workman is polishing an elaborately carved chair. And presently we pass a cart full of nothing but dolls' legs, every leg painted with a smart white stocking and an emerald-green slipper. And now the capital of Toyland comes in sight, an extensive, substantial-looking hamlet scattered far and wide along the slopes on the right bank of the torrent. The houses are real German Tyrolian homesteads, spacious, many-windowed, with broad eaves and bright green shutters, and front gardens full of flowers. There are two churches, a little old, lower church, and a large, smart upper church, with a bulbous belfry tower painted red. And there are at least half a dozen inns, all of which look clean and promising. The whole place, in short, has a bright, prosperous commercial air about it, like a Swiss manufacturing town. Here at the gas-house of the White Horse we are cordially received by a group of smiling girls, all sisters, who show us into excellent rooms, give us roast beef and prunes for supper, and entertain us with part-songs and zitter-playing in the evening. CHAPTER XIV. That night there came another thunderstorm, followed by three days of bad weather, during which we had more time than enough for inquiring into the curious trait of the place and seeing the people at their work. For here, as I have said, is the capital of Toyland. We had never even heard of St. Ulrich till a few weeks ago, and then but vaguely, as a village where wooden toys and wayside cries were made, and now we find that we have, so to say, been on intimate terms with the place from earliest infancy. That remarkable animal on a little-wheel platform which we fondly took to represent a horseback, with an eruption of scarlet discs upon his body, and a mane and tail derived from stippings of ancient fur-tibet, he is of the purest grown-northal breed. Those wooden-jointed dolls of all sizes, from babies half an inch in length to mothers of families two feet high, whose complexions always came off when we washed their faces, they are the aborigines of the soil. Those delightful little organs with red pipes and spiky barrels, turned by the hardest-working doll we ever knew. Those boxes of landscape scenery whose frisly cone-shaped trees and rubbed houses stood for faithful representations of tempeh in the veils of Arcady. At Noah's Arc, a Tyrolean homestead in a boat, in which the animals were truer to nature than their live originals in the zoological gardens, that monkey so evidently in the transition stage between man and ape, that spends his life toppling over the end of a stick. Those rocking horses with an armchair, fore and aft, that drae with immovable barrels, those wooden soldiers with supernaturally small waist and triangular noses. All these, all the cheap, familiar absurd treasures of your earliest childhood, and of mine, they all came, reader, from St. Ulrich, and they are coming from St. Ulrich to this day. They will keep coming when you and I are forgotten, for we are mere mortals, but those wooden warriors and those jointed dolls bear charmed lives and renew forever their indestructible youth. The two largest wholesale warehouses in the village are those of Herr Perger and of Mistress Insum and Printh. They show their establishment with readiness and civility, and I do not know when I have seen any sight so odd and so entertaining. At Insum and Printh's alone we were taken through more than thirty large storerooms, and twelve of those were full of dolls, millions of them, large and small, painted and unpainted, in bins and cases, on shelves, in parcels ready packed for exportation. In one room, especially devoted to Liliputians, an inch and a half in length, they were piled up in a disorderly heap, literally from floor to ceiling, and looked as if they had been shot out upon the floor by cartloads. Another room contained only horses. Two others were devoted to carts. One long corridor was stocked with nothing but wooden platforms to be fitted with horses by and by. Another room contained dolls' heads. The great dusk attic at the top of the house was entirely fitted up with enormous bins, like a wine cellar, each bin heaped high with a separate kind of toy, all in plain wood waiting for the painter. The cellars were stocked with the same goods, painted and ready for sale. Now, the whole population of the place, men and women alike, being with few exceptions brought up to some branch of the trade, and beginning from the age of six or seven years, the work is always going on and the dealers are always buying. It is calculated that, out of a population which, at the time of the last census, numbered only three thousand four hundred ninety-three souls, there are two thousand carvers, that is to say nothing of painters and guilders. Some of these carvers and painters are artists in the genuine sense of the word, others are mere human machines who make toys, as other human machines make matchboxes and matches. A smart doll-maker will turn out twenty dozen small-jointed dolls one inch and a half in length per diem. And of this sized doll alone, measures insum and printth by thirty thousand a week the whole year round. The regular system is for the wholesale dealers to buy the goods direct from the carvers, to store them till they are wanted, and to only give them out for painting as the orders come in from London or elsewhere. Thus the carver's work is regular and unfailing, but the painters being dependent on demands from without is more precarious. The warehouses of Herr Perger, though amply supplied with dolls and other toys, contain for the most part goods of a more artistic and valuable kind than those dealt in by Mr. Insum and Printth. All the studios in Europe are furnished with lay figures large and small from Herr Perger stores, and even with model horses of elaborate construction. Here also range solemnly all the length of dimly-lighted passages stand rows of beautiful saints, large as life exquisitely colored, in robes richly patterned and relieved with gold. Saint Cecilius, with little model organs, nightly Saint Theodorus in glittering armor, grave lovely Saint Christopher's with infant Christ's upon their shoulders, Saint Florian's with their buckets, Madonna's crowned with stars, Nun-lite Mater Dolorossos, the evangelists with their emblems, Saint Peter with his keys, and a host of other saints, angels, and martyrs. In other corridors we find the same goodly company reproduced in all degrees of smallness. In other rooms we have Christ's of all sizes and for all purposes, colored and uncolored in ivory ebony in wood for the benetier, for the oratory for the church altar for the wayside shrine. Some of these are perfect as works of art, faultlessly modeled and in many cases only too well-painted. One life-sized recumbent figure for a pietà was rendered with an elaborate truth, not to life but to death, that was positively startling. I should be afraid to say how many rooms full of smaller Christ we pass through in going over the upper stories of Herperger's enormous house. They were there, at all events, by the hundreds of thousands, of all sizes, of all prices, of all degrees of finish. In the attics we saw bends after bends of crowns of thorns only. One day was devoted to going from house to house and seeing the people at their work. As hundreds do precisely the same things, and have been doing them all their lives, with no ideas beyond their own immediate branch, there was inevitable sameness about this part of the pilgrimage, which it would be tedious to reproduce. I will, however, give one or two instances. In one house we found an old, old woman at work. Magdalena palled off by name. She carved cats, dogs, wolves, sheep, goats, and elephants. She has made these six animals her whole life long and has no idea of how to cut anything else. She makes them in two sizes and she turns out, as nearly as possible, a thousand of them every year. She has no model or drawing of any kind to work by, but goes on steadily, unerringly, using gouges of different sizes, and shaping out her cats, dogs, wolves, sheep, goats, and elephants, with an ease and an amount of truth to nature that would be clever if it were not so utterly mechanical. Magdalena palled off learned from her mother how to carve these six animals and her mother had learned in light manner from the grandmother. Magdalena has now taught the art to her own granddaughter, and so it will go on being transmitted for generations. In the adjoining house, Aloia's sonner, a fine stalwart brown man in a blue blouse, carves large Christs for churches. We found him at work upon one of three-quarters life-size. The whole figure, except the arms, was in one solid block, fixed upon a kind of spit between two upright posts so that he could turn it at his pleasure. It was yet all in the rough, half tree-trunk, half deity, with a strange, pathetic beauty already dawning out of the undeveloped features. It is a sight to see her sonner at work. He also has no model. His block is not even pointed, as it would be if he cut in marble. He has nothing to guide him save his consummate knowledge, but he dashes at his work in a wonderful way, scooping out the wood in long flakes at every rapid stroke, and sending the fragments flying in every direction. But then Aloia's sonner is an artist. It takes him ten days to cut a figure of three-quarters life-size, and fifteen to execute one as large as life. For this last the wood cost him fifteen florins, and his price for the complete figure is forty-five florins, about four pounds ten shillings English. In another house we found a whole family carving skulls and crossbones for fixing at the bases of crucifixes, not a cheerful branch of the profession. In other houses families that carved rocking horses, dolls, and all the toys previously named, in others families of painters. The ordinary toys are chiefly painted by women. In one house we found about a dozen girls painting gray horses with black points. In another house they painted only red horses with white points. It is a separate branch of the trade to paint the saddles and headgear. A good hand will paint twelve dozen horses a day, each horse being about one foot in length, and for these she has paid fifty-five soldy, or about two shillings and threepence English. I have dwelt at some length on the details of this curious trade, for the reason that, although it is practiced in so remote a place and in so traditional a way, it yet supplies a large slice of the world with the products of its industry. The art is said to have been introduced into the valley at the beginning of the last century, no doubt on account of the inexhaustible supply of arolas or penis sembra yielded by the forest of the Gros-Northal, the wood of which is peculiarly adapted for cheap carving, being very white, fine-grain and firmed, yet soft and easy to work. The people of St. Ulrich have lately restored and decorated their principal church, which is now the handsomest in South Tyrol. The stone carving and external decorations have been restored by hair plieselventura of Bricson, and the painted windows are by Nykessar of Innsbruck. The polychrome decorations are by hair part of St. Ulrich, the large wooden statues are by hair mug neck, also of St. Ulrich, and the smaller figures on the altars and pulpit, as well as the wood sculpture generally, are all by local artists. Color and gilding have, of course, been lavishly stowed on every part of the interior, but the general effect is rich and harmonious and not in the least overcharged. Above the high altar hangs an excellent copy of the famous Florentine Madonna of Simibui. The dialect of the Gros-Northal, called the Latin tongue, is supposed to be directly derived from the original Latin at some date contemporary with the period of Roman rule. It differs widely from all existing dialects of the modern Italian, and though in some points closely resembling the Raito Romanche of the Grissons and the lower Romanese of the Angadine, it is yet, we are told, so distinctly separated from both by well-marked differences, both grammatical and lexicographical, as to indicate kinship rather than identity of stock. Those, however, who admit with stub the unity of the Ration and Attraction languages, and who agree with Niber in believing the Rations of these Alps to have been the original Etruscan stock, will assign a still remoder origin to this singular fragment of an ancient tongue. It certainly seems more reasonable to suppose that the tide of immigration flowed down originally from the mountains to the plains, rather than that the aboriginal dwellers in the fertile flats of Lombardy should have colonized these comparatively barren Alpine fastnesses. This view the writer ventures to think receives strong confirmation from the fact that a large number of sepulcher bronzes distinctly Etruscanan character have been discovered at various times within the last twenty-five years in the immediate neighborhood of St. Ulrich. These objects collected and intelligently arranged by Herr Perger may be seen in his showroom. They fill two cabinets and comprise the usual articles discovered in graves of a very early date, such as bracelets, rings, fibulae, torques, earrings, weapons, et cetera. Philologists may be interested in knowing that there exists a curious book on the Groedner Thal in its language, with a grammar and vocabulary of the same, by Don Joseph Vien, a native of the Faça Thal and present parochal of St. Ulrich. From St. Ulrich to the Cicer Alps, the way leads up through a wooded ravine known as the Puffler Gorge, weary of waiting longer for the weather, we start at last on a somewhat doubtful morning, and find the paths wet and slippery, and the mountain streams all turbid from the rain of the last three days. Neat homesteads decorated with frescoed saints and Madonna's, and surrounded like English cottages with gardens full of beehives and flowers, are thickly scattered over the lower slopes towards St. Ulrich. These gradually diminish in number as we ascend the gorge, and after the little lonely church and hamlet of San Pietro cease altogether. Hence, a long and steep pull of about a couple of hours brings us out at last upon the level of that vast and fertile plateau known as the Cicer Alps, the largest and certainly the most beautiful of all these upper Tyrolian pasture mountains. Scattered about with clumps of dark fir trees, with little brown chalets, with herds of peaceful cattle, with groups of haymakers, and watched over by a semi-circle of solemn, gigantic mountains, it undulates away, slope beyond slope, all greenest grass, all richest wildflowers for miles and miles around. Yonder to the southwest the great plateau rolls on and on to the very foot of the schlern, which on this side looms up grandly through flitting clouds of mists. A low ridge of black and sheltered rocks, called the Rossan or horse-jaw, from its resemblance to a row of broken teeth in a jawbone of rock, connects the schlern with the north end of the Rossan garden range, as well as with the southern extremity of the Cicer Alps, and with the ridge out of which rose the Platt Kogel and Long Cuffle. But the Rossan garden is quite hidden in the mists that keep flying up with the wind from the side of Boatson. The Long Cuffle, however, stern and solitary with a sculpture of festoon of glaciers suspended above a deep cleft in the midst of its bristling pinnacles, and the Platt Kogel, crouching like an enormous toad with its back towards the schlern, show constantly, sometimes singly, sometimes both together, sometimes in sunshine, sometimes in shadow, as the vapors roll in part. A vast panorama which should comprehend the Marmalata and Tofana, and many a famous peak beside, ought to be visible from here. But all that side is wrapped in clouds today, and only the cella, and gardens on a massive stand free from vapor. Now and then the curtain is lifted for a moment towards the west, revealing brief glimpses of wooded hills and gleaming valleys, bounded by far mountain ranges, blue, tender and dreamlike as if outlined upon the sunny air. But, apart from the view at commands of its three nearest rivers, the Langkuffle, Platt Kogel, and Schlern, the great sight of the Cicer-Alp is the Cicer-Alp. Imagine an American prairie lifted up bodily upon a plateau from 5,500 to 6,000 feet in height. Imagine a waving sea of deep grass taking the broad flood of the summer sunshine and the floating shadows of the clouds. Realize how this upper world of pasture feeds from thirteen to fifteen hundred head of horned cattle contains three hundred herdsman's huts and four hundred hay chalets. Supports a large summer population of hay-makers and cowherds and measures no less than thirty-six English miles in circumference, and then, after all, I doubt if you will have conceived any kind of mental picture that does justice to the original. The air up here is indescribably pure, invigorating and precious. Given a good road leading up from Cice or Castel Ruth and a fairly good hotel on the top, the Cicer-Alp, as a mountain resort, would beat Montegeneroso, Albus Brun, Selixburg, and every other somo-frisch on this side of Italy out of the field. The peasants of these parts preserve a vague tradition of a prehistoric lake, said once upon a time to have occupied the center of this alpine plateau. A legend which gains some color from the fact that were it not for the gap of the Puffler Gorge down which the drainage flows to the Grodner Thal, there would at this present time be a lake in the depression on the summit. Having wandered and lingered up here for nearly a couple of hours, we at length begin descending by the course of the Chippetschbach, a torrent flowing down the deep cleft that separates the Cicer-Alp from the northwest face of the Schlearn. Coming presently to a cheesemaker's hut a few hundred feet below the edge of the plateau, we call our midday halt. A bench and a table are accordingly brought out and set in the shade. The good woman supplies us with wooden bowls of rich golden-colored cream. The mules graze, the guides go indoors and drink a jug of red wine with the herdsman and his son. The mists roll away, and the huge eq wheels of the Schlearn start out grandly from above the woods behind the chalet, as if on purpose to be sketched. From this point down to the bath-houses at Ratzes, the way winds ever through fur forests that exclude alike the near mountains and the distant view. About half way down we pass within sight of the ruined shell of Schloss Hounstein, once the home of Oswald of Wolkenstein, a renowned knight, traveler, and minus-singer, who was born in the year 1367, fought against the Turks at Nicopolis in 1396, was present at the storming of Schutze in 1415, encountered innumerable perils by land and sea in the Crimea, in Armenia, Persia, Asia Minor, Italy, Spain, England, Portugal, and the Holy Land, and died here in the castle of Hounstein in the year 1445. He was buried in the church of the famous abbey of Nusfitt near Brixton, where his tomb may be seen to this day. His love songs, hymns, and historical ballads are published at Innsbruck, collated from the only three ancient manuscript copies extant, one of which belongs to the present Count Wolkenstein, one to the Imperial Library at Vienna, and one to the Ferdinandium at Innsbruck. A more rough and primitive place than the little bath-house of Ratzes it would be difficult to conceive. It lies at the foot of those tremendous egg-wheels which we just saw now from the Herdsman's chalet, but we have come down some 1800 feet since then, and now find ourselves at the doors of a building that can only be described as two large wooden chalets united by a covered gallery. The bathrooms occupy the ground floor and the bedrooms the two upper stories. A tiny chapel, a small bowling ground, one large general's space cell, where eating, smoking, and card-playing are going on all day long, and a tumbledown dependance about three hundred yards off for the reception of the humbler class of patients, complete the catalogue of the attractions and resources of Ratzes. What the accommodation in that dependance might be like it is impossible to conjecture. For here in the establishment a small bedroom measuring ten feet by eight, containing a straw-stuffed bed, a wooden tub, a chair, a table, a looking-glass the size of a small octavo volume, and no scrap of carpet or curtain of any kind is the best lodging they have to offer. The mistress of Ratzes, a lively, clear-headed business like Widow with nine children, makes up seventy beds in the bath-house and could find occupants for seventy more if she had more space. Her customers are, for the most part, small tradesmen and their families from Boatsen and peasant farmers from the neighboring villages. Two springs, one impregnated with iron and the other with sulfur, supply these visitors with baths and medicine. There is a priest in daily attendance but no doctor, and the patients appear to choose their springs at haphazard. The baths are of the simplest kind, mere pine wood boxes cough and shaped with wooden lids just reaching to the chin of the occupant, and a wooden shelf inside to support the back of his head. These boxes ranged side-by-side in rows of eight or ten, fill a succession of gloomy, low-roofed basement chambers, and look exactly like rows of coffins in a series of dismal vaults. This impression is heightened very horribly when the unwary stranger, peeping timidly in, as I did, through a wide open door, sees ahead solemnly peering up from a coffin-lit in a dark corner, and hears a guttural voice saying in sepulchre accents, Guthinabend, One night at Ratz's is enough, and more than enough to satisfy the most curious traveler. Of its clatter, its tobacco smoke, its overcrowded discomfort, its rough accommodation, one has in truth no right to complain. The place such as it is suits those by whom it is frequented. We who go there neither for sulfur nor iron nor to escape from the overpowering heat of Bootson are, after all, intruders, and must take things as we find them. We leave Ratz's the next morning at half-past nine, having to be down at Atswang by two p.m. to catch the train for Bootson. The morning is magnificent, but we are all sad today, for it is our last journey with the two nestles. The path winds at first among fur forests, rounding the base of the great aguils, and passing a ghastly clef of ravine, down which a huge limb of the schlearn crashed down headlong, only twelve years back, strewing the gorge, the pastures, and all the mountain slope with masses of gigantic debris. Now, still and always descending, we pass farms, hamlets and churches, pear and cherry orchards, belts of reddening wheat and bearded barley, and come at last to an opening once there is a famous view. From here we look over three great vistas of valley, northwards up the Kuntersveg as far as Brixton and the Brenner, southwards towards Trient and the Valdinand, northwestward along the wide path of the upper etched in the direction of Meran. At the bottom of a deep trench between tremendous walls of cliff, close down beneath our feet, as it seems, flows wide and fast the gray tide of the Isaac. The high road that leads straight to Verona shows like a broad white line on this side of the river. The railway, a narrow black line burrowing here and there through tiny rabbit holes of tunnel runs along the other. A whole upper world of green hills, pasture alps, villages, churches, corn lands and pine forests lies spread out like a map, along the plateaus, out of which those three valleys are hewn, and beyond this upper world rises yet a higher, all mountain summits faint and far distance. From this point the path becomes a steep and sudden zigzag. It is all down, down, down. Presently we come upon the first vineyard and hear the shrill cry of the first Sikala. And now the rushing sound of the Isaac comes up through the trees, and now we are down in the valley, crossing the covered bridge, dismounting at the station. Here is Antzwang, here is the railway, here is the hot, dusty, busy, dead level world of commonplace again. At Antzwang we part from Clementi and the mules, Giuseppe going on with us to Botsin. Clementi is very loathed to say goodbye, and El, albeit unused to the melting mood, exchanges quite affecting Adjus with fair Nestle. As for Dark Nestle, Callus to the last, he shakes his ears and trots off quite gaily, evidently aware that he has finally got rid of me and rejoicing in the knowledge. And now, arriving at Botsin, we arrive also at the end of our Midsummer Ramble. For a week we linger on in this quaint old medieval town. For a week the pinnacles of the Schlearn and the Grand Facade of the Rosengarten yet look down upon us from the heights beyond the Isaac. As long as we can stroll out every evening to the old bridge down behind the Cathedral and see the sunset crimsoning those mighty precipices, we feel that we have not yet parted from them wholly. They are our last Dolomites, and from that bridge we bid them farewell. End of Section 37 End of Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequited Valleys Amid Summer Ramble through the Dolomites by Emilia B. Edwards Read by Cibella Denton, August 2007