These rites performed, the men and maids began to sing—­brown arms lounging on the table, and red hands folded in white aprons—­serious at first in hymn-like cadences, then breaking into wilder measures with a jodel at the close.  There is a measured solemnity in the performance, which strikes the stranger as somewhat comic.  But the singing was good; the voices strong and clear in tone, no hesitation and no shirking of the melody.  It was clear that the singers enjoyed the music for its own sake, with half-shut eyes, as they take dancing, solidly, with deep-drawn breath, sustained and indefatigable.  But eleven struck; and the two Christians, my old friend, and Palmy, said we should be late for church.  They had promised to take me with them to see bell-ringing in the tower.  All the young men of the village meet, and draw lots in the Stube of the Rathhaus.  One party tolls the old year out; the other rings the new year in.  He who comes last is sconced three litres of Veltliner for the company.  This jovial fine was ours to pay to-night.

When we came into the air, we found a bitter frost; the whole sky clouded over; a north wind whirling snow from alp and forest through the murky gloom.  The benches and broad walnut tables of the Bathhaus were crowded with men, in shaggy homespun of brown and grey frieze.  Its low wooden roof and walls enclosed an atmosphere of smoke, denser than the external snow-drift.  But our welcome was hearty, and we found a score of friends.  Titanic Fopp, whose limbs are Michelangelesque in length; spectacled Morosani; the little tailor Kramer, with a French horn on his knees; the puckered forehead of the Baumeister; the Troll-shaped postman; peasants and woodmen, known on far excursions upon pass and upland valley.  Not one but carried on his face the memory of winter strife with avalanche and snow-drift, of horses struggling through Fluela whirlwinds, and wine-casks tugged across Bernina, and haystacks guided down precipitous gullies at thundering speed ’twixt pine and pine, and larches felled in distant glens beside the frozen watercourses.  Here we were, all met together for one hour from our several homes and occupations, to welcome in the year with clinked glasses and cries of Prosit Neujahr!

The tolling bells above us stopped.  Our turn had come.  Out into the snowy air we tumbled, beneath the row of wolves’ heads that adorn the pent-house roof.  A few steps brought us to the still God’s acre, where the snow lay deep and cold upon high-mounded graves of many generations.  We crossed it silently, bent our heads to the low Gothic arch, and stood within the tower.  It was thick darkness there.  But far above, the bells began again to clash and jangle confusedly, with volleys of demonic joy.  Successive flights of ladders, each ending in a giddy platform hung across the gloom, climb to the height of some hundred and fifty feet; and all their rungs were crusted with frozen snow, deposited by trampling boots.  For up and down