Jakob, as herdsman, had left us at three o’clock to look after the cattle, we strolling with him as far as a wild old wood which formed a strange contrast to this Sunday afternoon, as lovely an August day as ever rejoiced the earth.  The near yet unattainable Hoch Gall glittered coldly white between the stems and branches of gigantic pines, which, scathed and bleached by lightning and storm, rose in the form of ruined towers or lay tumbled about in the wildest, dreariest confusion amongst the rugged enormous rocks, fit emblems of the forest in the Inferno inhabited by the souls of the lost.  Nor was this stern, forbidding scene enlivened when a melancholy man, carrying the dead body of a goat across his shoulders, crossed the torrent on a fallen tree and advanced slowly up the craggy path, followed by a little boy timidly picking his way behind.

“Ach, Mathies, in God’s name, another goat!” said Moidel, lifting her eyes from a little book, the life of the odd, humane Joseph II., which, bought for a few kreuzers at a fair, was worth as many guldens in the pleasure which it gave her.

The man glanced from under his eyebrows, and answered with a sigh, “Gott hat’s so woelln, Diendl” ("God would have it so, maiden"); and then he added in dialect, “It was a beautiful creature.  I missed it in the reckoning last night.  After mass I strode far and wide searching it, until an hour since I found the body hanging by a hind hoof from a cleft in the Auvogl Nock.  See, it has broken its leg in its struggles.  Ah, poor beast!  A solitary, cruel death, und hast ma g’nomma mei Ruah” ("and it has taken my rest from me").

“Poor Mathies! his half dozen goats are all that he has in the world.  He rents one of father’s huts, but since he has brought them to the Olm two or three are already dead.”  This Moidel explained to us as he moved dejectedly forward.  “Father, however, told him that our Olm was bad for goats.  They not only slip from the rocks, but grow thin and weakly.  Just the reverse of the cattle.  Onkel Johann—­there is no one so deep as he in cattle—­says that every blade of grass on our Olm is worth half a pint of milk.  And it’s not the air, nor the water, nor the winds that make it wholesome, but some law that he cannot understand.  Who can?  There is Jagdhaus, a wonderfully fertile sennerei an hour beyond Rein.  It is far finer than our Olm, which is so mountainous that timid new-comers amongst the cattle must first teach themselves to walk about; but at Jagdhaus, which is as large as a village, all the land is smooth, fat pasturage for miles.  Yet a curse rests on the place for which neither priests nor farmers can account.  Some seasons, it is true, all goes well, but in others the cattle are suddenly bitten, fall dead, and their flesh then turns black and rustles like paper.  Some say that it is an insect or animal that attacks them; others, that it is caused by the grass which they eat; and there are again others who are sure that it is a phantom which, touching them, blasts them.  And there seems reason in the idea, because when the priest of Taufers, who has an Olm there, goes and says mass and prays for the cattle, or when the Sterniwitz (landlord of the Stern), who has acres of pasturage and many heads of cattle at Jagdhaus, pays a Capuchin to go thither and pray, the murrain ceases.”