Moidel, Jakob and Franz, though they had looked with blind eyes on the print, did not turn deaf ears when we spoke; only we had to manage that all we said and thought did not come as a quoted sermon, but as suggestions and inquiries from us, who did not know half as much about a dairy and farm-life as they did.  First of all, we tried to make them believe that the staff of life need not of necessity be rye bread of so hard and flinty a nature as to require in every house a square wooden board and iron chopper to cut it.

“Yes,” said Moidel, “it is very hard for old people, who must needs sop it, but while one’s teeth are good the crunching is a pleasure.  And then it must needs be dry, because the oven can only be heated once in three months.  I wish it could come round oftener, for there is no going to bed on baking nights, with some three hundred loaves to pop into the oven.”

“How could the poor bake often,” suggested Jakob, “when there is only one oven amongst them in the village?”

“Why,” said we, looking very learned, “you have a common schoolmaster, and a common swineherd, and a common goose-boy:  why not have a common baker, who knew how to make good, light dough, and could bake a good batch of bread for each family weekly?”

To Franz, eating good bread only a few days old appeared woeful extravagance.  “Bread,” he said, “should be like rocks to last, not like snow to melt away.  The rye meal would fly before the wind at that rate, and where would the poor man then be?”

Butter and cheese-making, however, involved hours of deep discussion.  You would indeed have thought that man merely came into the world to make butter and cheese.  Personal experience after two summers in the Tyrol had made us reflect very much upon the butter and cheese question.  Whether regarded as a luxury or a necessity, the Swiss Gruyere and Emmenthal cheese and the fresh dainty pats of butter made the contrast striking in the Tyrol.  The milk and cream were rich and delicious, but became simply loathsome when transformed into butter or cheese.  We wondered how and why it was that we could never obtain perfectly palatable butter, until we discovered the universal practice of churning it, without salt, into huge oblong balls, large as the nave of a wheel, which naturally soon turn rancid.  It does not on this account lose its value to the natives, who use very little butter, melting it down into a clarified dripping called Schmalz for their endless fryings and frizzlings.  This badly made butter is, however, often adorned with the emblems of the Passion, such as the cross, ladder, crown of thorns and nails.  It was so at the Hofbauer’s Olm.  It is considered to enhance the value of the butter Kugel or ball, especially when given to the priest in payment for masses said for dead relations.  The Ursuline Sisters were paid for Moidel’s education in butter.