THE RISS. 151 



upon and holds you like an inevitable fate, and you can- 

 not shake it off, — a sense of the awful stillness amidst 

 -which you are. 



As the forester was not at home, nothing could be 

 decided on. I looked about me and chatted with the 

 under-gamekeepers, one of whom had just brought home 

 the good chamois I saw hanging from the paling on my 

 arrival ; among them too was a Solacher, brother to my 

 friend Max and of the girls at Baierisch Zell, so with 

 him I made special acquaintance. 



" You must have a good depth of snow here in winter," 

 I observed : " there is not much chance of getting out 

 except with snow-shoes, I suppose." 



" No, indeed," was the answer : " I have myself seen 

 the snow thus high," pointing to a finger-post which 

 was much taller than himself. "And you know in the 

 Hinter Riss, if any one dies in winter, the peasants can- 

 not even get out to bury the body." 

 " What do they do then ?" 



1 ' They lay the corpse up in the loft under the roof, and 

 it freezes as hard as a rock and remains quite unchanged. 

 When the thaw comes it is carried to the churchyard 

 and buried." 



And there were antlers to be looked at, of stags shot 

 that season, — the last indeed but the day before,— and 

 questions enough to ask about the game, and the places 

 where the stags were most plentiful. Here, as every- 

 where, the game had been greatly thinned ; but chamois 

 were still in the mountains, and on the cold mornings 

 during the rutting season the low hoarse bellowing of 

 the stags might be heard reverberating across the valley. 

 The right of chase here had belonged until lately to 

 His Serene Highness Prince Leiningen, and nothing 

 could be in finer order than this whole forest while in 



