wooden sheds, in
which rows of large tubs were placed. The patients bathed twice a day,
being covered over with boards and a horse-rug, but the head was left
free. There was no doctor: each could doctor himself by lying in the
hot water and drinking more or fewer glasses of the iron water daily.
It poured from a spout into a wooden trough between the chalet and the
barn; and this explained old Nanni's mutterings after our arrival.

Although the peasant bathers as a class made no distinct impression on
us, the half dozen men looking like facsimiles of each other, and the
seven women appearing always to be one and the same, still there were
one or two figures which stand prominently forth, from the more direct
relations into which we came with them.

First, an old peasant-woman, whom we heard, as we descended from the
Kronplatz, singing to a crying baby as we approached the house:

Engeli, Bengeli, wilt thou go to America?
Rumelti, Pumelti, wilt thou go to England?

She instantly stopped her ditty when she saw us emerge from the wood.

Curious, was it not? and yet we had neither brought our passports with
us, nor had we followed the example of previous guests and proved our
learning by writing our names and birthplaces in the visitors' book--a
large volume for which every door-lintel and piece of wainscot in the
house acted as leaves. No, but some little bird had been whispering
about us on the mountain-side.

The next figure is another peasant-woman, tall and somewhat thin,
with a patient, beseeching look in her face. This I quietly perceived
whilst I sat busily writing near the house at a table which Moidel had
carried out for me, yet I would not look up, because she stood eyeing
me with an innocent stare, as if wishful to enter into conversation. A
few minutes later a buxom matron stepped forth from the passage of
the chalet. It acted as a convenient thoroughfare on the road between
Reischach and Geisselburg. Her daughter, a girl of sixteen, who was
with her, wore two beaver hats, the uppermost evidently bran-new and a
fresh purchase. The first peasant-woman addressed the newcomer with a
"God greet thee, Trina! Thou hast been shopping, I see."

"God greet thee, Gertraud! It is only a new hat for the moidel. We
were going down for Scapulary Sunday; so I thought I might go on to
town and sell thirty pounds of cow-hair, the savings of ten years;
for, now there's to be a railway, beds are wanted, and as I recei