The party now dropped into a dignified silence, which might have lasted as long as we had remained had it not appeared pleasanter to keep the senner intent on a story, rather than on each feature of our several faces.

Speaking proper German, also proving to be understood by him, one of the group began:  “Of course you have heard of the clever Tyrolese peasant, still living, Hans Jakob Fetz?”

Neither he nor Moidel had ever heard of him, and as they both pricked up their ears, they learned the following:  Fetz possesses a little farm called the Pines.  It has, however, the disadvantage of lying on both sides of a wild rushing torrent, the Ache, a river given to inundations in the spring, and over which there is no bridge in his neighborhood.  Thus, though Hans Jakob could sit at his door, and almost count the ears of corn in his fields across the river, he must make a circuit of five miles to reach them.  Such an immense loss of time and labor troubled him no little, and, as he had no desire to sell his property, he determined by hook or by crook to remedy the evil.  Day and night he turned the perplexing problem over in his mind.  He might, to be sure, swim across, but then there were his tools to be carried.  At last it flashed upon him:  Why not make an aerial car?  He bought for this purpose some very thick iron wire, stretched it in two parallel lines across the river, fastening the four ends very firmly; constructed a bench on iron rollers, which, sustained by the wire, ran across the river in a trice, and his aerial car was a reality.  Here, indeed, was a triumph.  It worked admirably, and the whole neighborhood became excited and astonished about the air-railway, as they called it.  The news spreading, it brought finally some gentlemen from the town of Dornbirn, who were wild to have a ride across the river.  Hans Jakob refused it:  he doubted the strength being sufficient for more than one passenger; but they persisting in their urgent demand, he at last reluctantly consented.  They would not, or else they could not, go without him.  So, the party being seated on the bench, he unfastened the hook, when they should have been instantly whirled across.  But, alas! his fears proved true:  the wire gave way, and down they all went, plump into the wild rushing river.  A great fright and wetting—­that was all, for the time being, until the gentlemen, although they had promised not to say a word on the subject, having whispered it to this friend and that, leaving no part uncolored, the town of Dornbirn grew scandalized at a mad peasant’s audacity.  The authorities took it in hand, and a solemn gendarme visited Hans Jakob with strict orders from government to desist from such perilous, hairbreadth inventions for the future.  Poor Hans! he now regarded himself not only as the laughing-stock of the whole country, but as a ruined man.  He had spent all his savings on his first venture; but neither official reprimand nor loss of his money could keep his busy, active