The incongruous, but comfortable, modern hotel has a huge glass veranda, where you can eat your dinner and observe human nature in its transparent holiday disguises.  I was much pleased and entertained by a family, or confederacy, of people attired as peasants—­the men with feathered hats, green stockings, and bare knees—­the women with bright skirts, bodices, and silk neckerchiefs—­who were always in evidence, rowing gondolas with clumsy oars, meeting the steamboat at the wharf several times a day, and filling the miniature garden of the hotel with rustic greetings and early Salzkammergut attitudes.  After much conjecture, I learned that they were the family and friends of a newspaper editor from Vienna.  They had the literary instinct for local colour.

The fishing at Hallstatt is at Obertraun.  There is a level stretch of land above the lake, where the river flows peaceably, and the fish have leisure to feed and grow.  It is leased to a peasant, who makes a business of supplying the hotels with fish.  He was quite willing to give permission to an angler; and I engaged one of his sons, a capital young fellow, whose natural capacities for good fellowship were only hampered by a most extraordinary German dialect, to row me across the lake, and carry the net and a small green barrel full of water to keep the fish alive, according to the custom of the country.  The first day we had only four trout large enough to put into the barrel; the next day I think there were six; the third day, I remember very well, there were ten.  They were pretty creatures, weighing from half a pound to a pound each, and coloured as daintily as bits of French silk, in silver gray with faint pink spots.

There was plenty to do at Hallstatt in the mornings.  An hour’s walk from the town there was a fine waterfall, three hundred feet high.  On the side of the mountain above the lake was one of the salt-mines for which the region is celebrated.  It has been worked for ages by many successive races, from the Celt downward.  Perhaps even the men of the Stone Age knew of it, and came hither for seasoning to make the flesh of the cave-bear and the mammoth more palatable.  Modern pilgrims are permitted to explore the long, wet, glittering galleries with a guide, and slide down the smooth wooden rollers which join the different levels of the mines.  This pastime has the same fascination as sliding down the balusters; and it is said that even queens and princesses have been delighted with it.  This is a touching proof of the fundamental simplicity and unity of our human nature.

But by far the best excursion from Hallstatt was an all-day trip to the Zwieselalp—­a mountain which seems to have been especially created as a point of view.  From the bare summit you look right into the face of the huge, snowy Dachstein, with the wild lake of Gosau gleaming at its foot; and far away on the other side your vision ranges over a confusion of mountains, with all the white peaks of the Tyrol stretched along the horizon.  Such a wide outlook as this helps the fisherman to enjoy the narrow beauties of his little rivers.  No sport is at its best without interruption and contrast.  To appreciate wading, one ought to climb a little on odd days.