THE ALM HUTTE. 119 



they come, they too may not find their way home 

 again." 



The manner in which my friend Maxl told this story, 

 made me strongly suspect he knew very well why the 

 Tyrolian never went home again. Of course he vowed 

 that lie knew nothing of the matter, and it certainly is 

 possible he did not ; but there was an archness and a 

 gusto in the way he spoke of it, that made me feel 

 sure of the contrary. As the man's friends never found 

 him, there was certainly a possibility that he had fallen 

 over a precipice, and that the body had rolled down into 

 some deep impenetrable chasm. Such a mountain is of 

 immense extent ; the rents, and clefts, and hollows are 

 innumerable, and if the body had by chance slipped 

 under one of the thousand fragments of rock that are 

 lying about, this circumstance alone might be enough 

 to hide it from the eye of the most careful seeker. Long 

 after, perhaps some chance passer-by might stumble over 

 a few bleached bones, but no one would know whose 

 they were or aught of the dead man's story. 



The case of the Tyrolian on the Plau Berg is by no 

 means a solitary one of the kind. Occasionally, too, 

 the forester's wife will wait and watch in vain for her 

 husband's return. It is not long since that the body 

 of one of the assistant-foresters of Berchtesgaden was 

 found upon the mountain : it had been drawn aside from 

 the path and flung among the latschen, which accounted 

 for its not being found until several months after he 

 had been shot. The poacher was evidently hidden from 

 view, and had allowed him to come along the path 

 within a yard or two of the muzzle of his rifle ; for the 

 dead man's clothes were still black and singed where 

 the ball had entered. It had passed through the middle 

 of his chest. 



