ilst clearing away the empty glasses, looked
compassionately upon him as on one of her fattening chickens in danger
of pip, and patiently inveigled him to a cozy nook down stairs, where
his heavy breathing and steady snorts kept time to her monotonous
dish-washing. On he slept during prayers, during the hour spent at the
Blauen Bock, when the Hofbauer treated the priest and his guests on
this auspicious thanksgiving-day. He woke up, however, to do his duty
like a man "with a mouthful of supper" whilst the horses were being
put into the gigs. Then, in a state of heavy, speechless resignation,
he was conveyed to his seat between a bauer and his wife, which,
though a tight fit in the morning, had strangely become tighter, and
where, circumstances thus pinning his arms to his side, and with his
aching head upon his breast in the most uncomfortable of attitudes,
the poor fat boy was jolted away in the twilight.

The other relations, all weightier mortals, more or less, than when
they arrived, were packed and squeezed into their creaking vehicles;
the very small vacuums remaining on or under the seats, to say nothing
of broad laps, being filled with krapfen. You would indeed have
supposed that the Hof were one great patent krapfen manufactory,
with the sole right of making, baking by steam and selling these
indigestible, leathery, yet brittle puffs so dear to the Tyrolese
palate, had not the figures of men, women and children, humble guests
at more modest dwellings, been seen filing along the highway or
crossing the moorland slopes, each bearing a light but bulging bundle
of krapfen tied up in a gay blue, crimson or yellow handkerchief.

It was indeed a krapfen dispensation. A piled-up offering stood in the
little oratory employed as a store-room by us; the cock crowed and
the hens clucked for their share of the Herrschaft's krapfen under
the parlor windows in the early morning; the men- and maid-servants
hurried buoyantly into town to sell their krapfen perquisites to less
favored mortals; the pedestrian bricklayer and carpenter, respectable
men with money stored away in their broad belts--portions of that
great army of Tyrolese who, possessing neither trade nor manufactures
in their native land, are forced in an ant-like manner to stray into
Bavaria and Austria until they can return laden with their
winter store, since the mere fattening of cattle cannot support a
nation,--these respectable but footsore men, wending their