The other relations, all weightier mortals, more or less, than when they arrived, were packed and squeezed into their creaking vehicles; the very small vacuums remaining on or under the seats, to say nothing of broad laps, being filled with krapfen.  You would indeed have supposed that the Hof were one great patent krapfen manufactory, with the sole right of making, baking by steam and selling these indigestible, leathery, yet brittle puffs so dear to the Tyrolese palate, had not the figures of men, women and children, humble guests at more modest dwellings, been seen filing along the highway or crossing the moorland slopes, each bearing a light but bulging bundle of krapfen tied up in a gay blue, crimson or yellow handkerchief.

It was indeed a krapfen dispensation.  A piled-up offering stood in the little oratory employed as a store-room by us; the cock crowed and the hens clucked for their share of the Herrschaft’s krapfen under the parlor windows in the early morning; the men- and maid-servants hurried buoyantly into town to sell their krapfen perquisites to less favored mortals; the pedestrian bricklayer and carpenter, respectable men with money stored away in their broad belts—­portions of that great army of Tyrolese who, possessing neither trade nor manufactures in their native land, are forced in an ant-like manner to stray into Bavaria and Austria until they can return laden with their winter store, since the mere fattening of cattle cannot support a nation,—­these respectable but footsore men, wending their way from Steiermark, were received with a hearty welcome and krapfen; and the wandering family, who were not at all respectable, but were treated with some distrust and more commiseration—­the traveling tinker, his dark-eyed, dark-skinned wife and saucy, grimy children, who were barred and bolted with their barrow, their rags and their kettles in the barn that night as in a traveler’s rest—­ate with marvelous relish their bountiful-gleanings of this great krapfen harvest.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XII.

Cold rain and mist have now set in.  The landscape, which has from the first possessed a peculiar charm for us, is often blotted from view.  The varied, undivided yet most individual range of dolomites which rises on the edge of the eastern horizon, instead of melting under the soft influences of warm sunshine and quivering air into glowing crimson, purple, palpitating mountains—­which only with advancing night turn into gray, motionless pinnacles and battlements of the great dolomitic land that stretches beyond—­now remain, whenever visible, cold, hard masses of snow, like rigid nuns of some ascetic order.

It is time to be gone.  And Fanni, the sturdy, devoted attendant specially engaged to wait upon us during the last season, is wild to accompany us to Italy—­comfortable Italy, where the washing water does not freeze in winter, and where maize polenta is as cheap and plentiful as the brown buckwheat plenten of Tyrol.  She has a good stock of clothes:  she wants no wages, only her journey paid.  Surely we will take her?  We give her no hopes, merely promising that if we come another year and she be then out of place, we will gladly employ her.  This is a drop of comfort, and she rushes down stairs to convey at least this bit of good news to Kathi.