The Alp, or Olm (to use the provincial word), lay at the distance of about six hours, and the Hofbauer went up to examine the state of the pasturage before his son and the cattle finally started.  In two days he returned.  “The going up of the cattle must be postponed at least a week,” he said, “for snow had fallen at the huts the depth of a man; and the river had swollen to such a height that it had carried two houses away in St. Wolfgang, the highest mountain-village; and even life had been lost.”

This delay caused a respite from hard work.  The next morning Alois’s arms did not move like unwearying machinery, and, the ten o’clock-dinner being over, we saw him seated at his ease on the adjoining hillside.  Should we go and speak to him?  He appeared different from the ordinary run of his class (though cobblers are often clever men enough), and moreover of a decidedly friendly turn of mind.  We determined that we would.  We joined Alois on the stony, waste hillside, crowned by two trees with a crucifix in the centre, which formed from the house, with its background of mountains, ever a melancholy, soul-touching little poem.

“You have not quite such hard work to-day, Schuster?”

He smiled and said, “Do your work betimes, and then rest; and where better than under the shadow of the cross?”

“Yes, and the crucifix which you have chosen is more pleasing than the generality which are sown broadcast over the fields of the Tyrol.  Why are they made so hideous and revolting?”

We spoke out freely, because the unusually intelligent face before us evidently belonged to a thinker.  Candor of speech pleased him.  Nevertheless, he answered as if musing, “They appear ugly to you:  well they may be.  Ja, but the most who look upon them are men and women acquainted with many sorrows—­sudden deaths by falls from precipices, destruction of house and home by lightning, floods, avalanches, failure of crops, and many another visitation—­and it soothes their perhaps selfish natures to see these anguished features, these blood-stained limbs—­signs of still greater suffering—­whilst they pray that only such crosses may be laid on them as will keep them in obedience to His will.  Just before you came up the hill I was thinking of a strange history connected with a crucifix—­one that I read only ten days ago in the house of a Hochmair himself.”

It merely needed silence for Schuster Alois to repeat the tale, and he soon began:  “It is the Tyroler Adolph Pichler who narrates it.  He says that once in his rambles he came to a little chapel, over which hung a blasted larch—­such a desolate wreck of a tree that he naturally asked the guide he had with him why it was not cut down.  Now, the guide was an old man who knew every, tradition and legend, besides all the family histories in that part of the Tyrol.  ‘That tree,’ said he, ’is left there purposely, as the reminder of a great crime, and nobody would think of touching