this place the scantily-inhabited Brandenberg valley opens on the broad
and sunny Innthal. The former is merely a mountain-gorge. Far up in its
recesses stands a small cottage belonging to the keeper of a wood-drift,
and in close proximity to this solitary habitation is a second very wild
and wellnigh inaccessible ravine, the scene of the coming adventure.

Having passed the night in the modest little inn at Rattenberg, Hansel
and I set off next morning long before sunrise on our eight hours' tramp
to the wood-drift by a path which was in most places of just sufficient
breadth to allow of one person passing at a time. Few of my
fellow-travelers of the day before would have recognized me in the
costume I had donned for the occasion--an old and much-patched coat,
short leathern trousers, as worn and torn as the poorest woodcutter's,
and a ten-seasoned hat which had been originally green, then brown, and
had now become gray. My face and knees were still bronzed from the
exposure attendant on a long course of Alpine climbing the year before.

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF TOMERL'S COTTAGE.]

The keeper of the wood-drift was an old acquaintance of mine, whose
qualities as a keen sportsman had shone forth when four or five years
previously I had quartered myself for a month in his secluded
neighborhood, spending the day, and frequently also the night, on the
peaks and passes surrounding his cottage. To the buxom Moidel, his
pretty young wife, I was also no stranger, and her smile and blush
assured me that she still remembered the time when, reigning supreme
over her father's cattle on a neighboring alp, she had administered to
the wants of the young sportsman seeking a night's lodging in the
lonesome chalet. Many a merry evening had I spent in the low,
oak-paneled "general room" of Tomerl's cottage when he was still a gay