life as they did. First of all, we tried to make them
believe that the staff of life need not of necessity be rye bread
of so hard and flinty a nature as to require in every house a square
wooden board and iron chopper to cut it.

"Yes," said Moidel, "it is very hard for old people, who must needs
sop it, but while one's teeth are good the crunching is a pleasure.
And then it must needs be dry, because the oven can only be heated
once in three months. I wish it could come round oftener, for there
is no going to bed on baking nights, with some three hundred loaves to
pop into the oven."

"How could the poor bake often," suggested Jakob, "when there is only
one oven amongst them in the village?"

"Why," said we, looking very learned, "you have a common schoolmaster,
and a common swineherd, and a common goose-boy: why not have a common
baker, who knew how to make good, light dough, and could bake a good
batch of bread for each family weekly?"

To Franz, eating good bread only a few days old appeared woeful
extravagance. "Bread," he said, "should be like rocks to last, not
like snow to melt away. The rye meal would fly before the wind at that
rate, and where would the poor man then be?"

Butter and cheese-making, however, involved hours of deep discussion.
You would indeed have thought that man merely came into the world to
make butter and cheese. Personal experience after two summers in
the Tyrol had made us reflect very much upon the butter and cheese
question. Whether regarded as a luxury or a necessity, the Swiss
Gruyere and Emmenthal cheese and the fresh dainty pats of butter made
the contrast striking in the Tyrol. The milk and cream were rich and
delicious, but became simply loathsome when transformed into butter
or cheese. We wondered how and why it was that we could never obtain
perfectly palatable butter, until we discovered the universal practice
of churning it, without salt, into huge oblong balls, large as the
nave of a wheel, which naturally soon turn rancid. It does not on this
account lose its value to the natives, who use very little butter,
melting it down into a clarified dripping called Schmalz for their
endless fryings and frizzlings. This badly made butter is, however,
often adorned with the emblems of the Passion, such as the cross,
ladder, crown of thorns and nails. It was so at the Hofbauer's Olm.
It is considered to enhance the value of the butter _Kugel_ or ball,
especially when given to the