on which stand four linden-trees surrounding a stone cross.  These buildings are not mere farms but house within them those handicrafts which are indispensable to the human race and furnish the mountaineers with all the products of industry which they require.  In the valley and along the mountain-sides many other huts and cots are scattered, as is very often the case in mountain regions.  These habitations belong to the parish and school-district and pay tribute to the artisans we mentioned by purchasing their wares.  Still other more distant huts belong to the village, but are so deeply ensconced in the recesses of the mountains that one cannot see them at all from the valley.  Those who live in them rarely come down to their fellow-parishioners and in winter frequently must keep their dead until after the snows have melted away in order to give them a burial.  The greatest personage whom the villagers get to see in the course of the year is the priest.

[Illustration:  ADALBERT STIFTER DAFFINGER]

They greatly honor him, and usually he himself through a longer sojourn becomes so accustomed to the solitude of the valley that he not unwillingly stays and simply lives on there.  At least, it has not happened in the memory of man that the priest of the village had been a man hankering to get away or unworthy of his vocation.

No roads lead through the valley.  People use their double-track cart-paths upon which they bring in the products of their fields in carts drawn by one horse.  Hence, few people come into the valley, among them sometimes a solitary pedestrian who is a lover of nature and dwells for some little time in the upper room of the inn and admires the mountains; or perhaps a painter who sketches the small, pointed spire of the church and the beautiful summits of the rocky peaks.  For this reason the villagers form a world by themselves.  They all know each other by name and their several histories down from the time of grandfather and great-grandfather; they all mourn when one of them dies; know what name the new-born will receive; they have a language differing from that of the plains; they have their quarrels, which they settle among themselves; they assist one another and flock together when something extraordinary has happened.

They are conservative and things are left to remain as they were.  Whenever a stone drops out of a wall, the same stone is put back again, the new houses are built like the old ones, the dilapidated roofs are repaired with the same kind of shingles, and if there happen to be brindled cows on a farm, calves of the same color are raised always, so that the color stays on the farm.

To the south of the village one sees a snow-mountain which seems to lift up its shining peaks right above the roofs of the houses.  Yet it is not quite so near.  Summer and winter it dominates the valley with its beetling crags and snowy sides.  Being the most remarkable object in the landscape, this mountain is of main interest to the inhabitants and has become the central feature of many a story.