“Oh, na, na!  The woods are none of ours.  The graf de Ferraris too has sold the estate to a gesellschaft from Vienna.  They care nothing for the castle, but are hungry for timber.  The count lives a long way off, and does not feel it, but it must eat the heart of his aged lady mother to the fibres—­she lives in the village—­to know that foreigners are sweeping down masses of trees by wholesale—­trees that have always kept the poor man’s noodles boiling.  And where are the planks to come from for our houses, our barns, our stables?  And how can the cattle be kept from straying without fences of wood?  Then, too, avalanches of snow and of stones will fall, and maybe overwhelm the village.  Thanks to the Mother of God! they will drop on my grave, but, Lord Jesus, the children and the children’s children!”

Having given us these sad scraps of information, and heaving a big sigh, the poor old soul lifted up her bundle of chips and went fumbling forward over her stumbling-blocks.

Sad and true was the picture which she had drawn.  Nor does it, alas! belong exclusively to Taufers, but to the whole Tyrol.  In many instances the people are themselves eager for this reckless clearing.  They hope thereby to secure more pasturage, the feeding and rearing of cattle being the great idea of wealth to the Tyroler.  So they make ready money of their timber, which now in the form of masts floats on the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal.  The Venetians, requiring timber, have turned the once beautiful, richly-wooded Dalmatia into a dreary, barren land.  In the Tyrol it is not generally foreigners, but the natives, who unhesitatingly sweep away woods, which, causing grass and plants to grow, have enabled human habitations to be erected on spots that would otherwise be but dreary wildernesses, the battle-fields of chilling winds and scorching sunshine.  The precious timber, which like refuse they cart into the clumsy yawning craters called stoves, or else sell out of the country for economy so called, might not only supply the land for centuries with a proper amount of fuel, either as wood or charcoal, but bring prosperity to many a sequestered village if turned into tools and kitchen utensils, whilst still leaving thousands of trees for export.  “The supply has never failed yet,” say the Tyrolese:  “why should we replant forests to have to cut them down again, when the ground, too, is good for grass or corn?” So the axe lies ruthlessly at the root of every tree, for a heavy reckoning hereafter to the Tyroler.

With a weighing and balancing over every step which we took worthy of a diplomatist, we finally stood upon the drawbridge of the castle.  Here the savage customs of the rude days in which it was built immediately impress the beholder.  Traces remain of the ponderous iron portcullis, heavy wooden bars, arrow-holes, and slits in the masonry for the pouring of boiling water or oil upon adverse knight or lordly freebooter.  A steep path leads through two great entrance-gates into the large inner court, which is erected upon the virgin rock.  A roof of old wooden shingles shelters the well, and ancient rotting timber mingles everywhere with the impervious stone in the massive buildings of the castle, conveying a sense of weakness and decay in the midst of the strongest durability.