, "_Thy neighbor as thyself._"

THE STORY OF THE PASSION.

The Alps are not confined to Switzerland. They fill that little
country full and overflow in all directions, into Austria, Italy,
Germany, and France. Beautiful everywhere, these mountains are nowhere
more charming than in Southern Bavaria. Grass-carpeted valleys, lakes
as blue as the sky above them, dark slopes of pine and fir, over-topped
by crags of gray limestone dashed by perpetual snow, the Bavarian
Oberland is one of the most delightful regions in all Europe. When
Attila and the Huns invaded Germany fifteen centuries ago, it is said
that their cry was, "On to Bavaria--on to Bavaria! for there dwells the
Lord God himself!"

In the heart of these mountains, shut off from the highways of travel
by great walls of rock, lies the valley of the little river Ammer. Its
waters are cold and clear, for they flow from mountain springs, and its
willow-shaded eddies are full of trout. At first a brawling torrent,
its current grows more gentle as the valley widens and the rocks
recede, and at last the little river flows quietly with broad windings
through meadows carpeted with flowers. On these meadows, a couple of
miles apart, lie the twin villages of the Ammer Valley--the one
world-famous, the other unheard of beyond the sound of its
church-bells--Ober and Unter Ammergau.

Long, straggling, Swiss-like towns, these villages on the Ammer meadows
are. You may find a hundred such between Innsbruck and Zuerich. Stone
houses, plastered outside and painted white, stand close together, each
one passing gradually backward into woodshed, barn, and stable. You
may lose your way in the narrow, crooked streets, as purposeless in
their direction as the footsteps of the cows who first surveyed them.

Oberammergau is a cleaner town than most, with a handsomer church, and
a general evidence of local pride and modest prosperity. Frescoes on
the walls of the houses here and there, paintings of saints and angels,
bear witness to a love of beauty and to the prevalence of a religious
spirit. These pictures, still bright after more than a century's wear,
go back to the time when the peasant boy, Franz Zwink, of Oberammergau,
mixed paints for a famous artist who painted the interior of the Ettal
Monastery and the village church. The boy learned the art as well as
the process, and when his master was gone, he covered the walls of his
native town with pictures such as m