“Yes,” replied Joergel, who appeared to have been much interested by the whole history; “but what puzzles me is, how a poor devil who worked so slow could be a genius.  I thought sharp people took more after the Almighty, and hurried up their work in the twinkling of an eye.”

“Do the trees which you look after shoot up in the twinkling of an eye?”

“Why, no.  Good, stout wood, with strength enough to resist storms and to cleave to the rocks of these mountainsides, takes a lifetime.  I often warn the peasants against cutting their trees down.  It is easy to destroy, but not to build up, I tell them; and the trees as they stand are the best preventatives against land-slips.”

“Have you always been a forester?” we asked.

Not he.  It was true that in fine weather he often wandered for thirty miles a day, his district reaching as far, but he had seen more of the world than these fir woods.  He had been in the habit, as a young man, of taking horses for sale into Italy, where he had seen Milan cathedral and the town-hall in Bergamo.  He, however, gave up his trade in 1831, as his father died in that year of dropsy, and his mother ten days after of sorrow, and he thought it only right to stay with his sister Nanni.  Franz had gone off and married a rich widow against his advice, for he knew she would treat a second husband as a day-laborer; and what he had predicted proved true.  However, she and her money were gone out of the family now.  Her body lay in the graveyard, and he supposed that the priest who said masses for her soul knew where it was by this time.  As for Hansel, he was still at liberty, and had well played his part in the world.  He had protected the emperor Ferdinand when he fled with his consort to Innspruck in 1848, standing as sentinel at the gate of the faithful city.  Later on he had marched with the Tyrolese imperial Jaeger corps into Hungary, and fought for the same master there.  Again in 1866 he was righting under the archduke Albert, until, on the feast of Johanni, he was disabled at the battle of Custozza by a wound in his foot.  The victory over the Italians made him for a time forget the pain, but afterward it grew dreadful, lasting for seventeen months, and not an army surgeon could help him.  Then, however, he determined to try a cow-doctor, who in two weeks set him on his pins again.

“And you might not believe it,” continued Joergel, who grew animated in his narration, “but I too have seen service.  In the last war between Italy and Austria the students of Innspruck formed a corps, and young Count Arlberg, being an active volunteer, proposed that I should go as cook.  The motion was carried, and I marched with one hundred and ninety-three young gentlemen to Bira.  Sometimes with help and sometimes with none, I cooked for them all.  I fed them on meat dumplings and plenten, until in a few weeks the cook and the soldaten—­or the cook and the salaten, which you will—­had to pull up stakes and beat an honorable retreat through the Breimer.  At Brixen I bade farewell to my regiment, and have since, under Count Arlberg the father, looked after stocks and stones, and not soldiers.  Well, well!  Austria has lost Italy, but the Tyrol can hold up its head, for it stands now as a great natural rampart between the two countries.”