nsides, takes a lifetime. I
often warn the peasants against cutting their trees down. It is easy
to destroy, but not to build up, I tell them; and the trees as they
stand are the best preventatives against land-slips."

"Have you always been a forester?" we asked.

Not he. It was true that in fine weather he often wandered for thirty
miles a day, his district reaching as far, but he had seen more of the
world than these fir woods. He had been in the habit, as a young
man, of taking horses for sale into Italy, where he had seen Milan
cathedral and the town-hall in Bergamo. He, however, gave up his trade
in 1831, as his father died in that year of dropsy, and his mother ten
days after of sorrow, and he thought it only right to stay with his
sister Nanni. Franz had gone off and married a rich widow against his
advice, for he knew she would treat a second husband as a day-laborer;
and what he had predicted proved true. However, she and her money
were gone out of the family now. Her body lay in the graveyard, and
he supposed that the priest who said masses for her soul knew where it
was by this time. As for Hansel, he was still at liberty, and had well
played his part in the world. He had protected the emperor Ferdinand
when he fled with his consort to Innspruck in 1848, standing as
sentinel at the gate of the faithful city. Later on he had marched
with the Tyrolese imperial Jaeger corps into Hungary, and fought
for the same master there. Again in 1866 he was righting under the
archduke Albert, until, on the feast of Johanni, he was disabled at
the battle of Custozza by a wound in his foot. The victory over the
Italians made him for a time forget the pain, but afterward it grew
dreadful, lasting for seventeen months, and not an army surgeon could
help him. Then, however, he determined to try a cow-doctor, who in two
weeks set him on his pins again.

"And you might not believe it," continued Joergel, who grew animated in
his narration, "but I too have seen service. In the last war between
Italy and Austria the students of Innspruck formed a corps, and young
Count Arlberg, being an active volunteer, proposed that I should go
as cook. The motion was carried, and I marched with one hundred
and ninety-three young gentlemen to Bira. Sometimes with help and
sometimes with none, I cooked for them all. I fed them on meat
dumplings and plenten, until in a few weeks the cook and the
_soldaten_--or the cook and the _salaten_, which y