We had begun truly to descend, and our friendly woman, seeing that
"Shank's mare" required no further encouragement, bade us a friendly
good-evening, with a cheerful "May you live long and well!" She
had almost dipped out of sight when our Jörgel, with praiseworthy
forethought, called after her to apprise the bath people, as she
passed, of our advent.

The path had become broader and more beaten. There was a gradual sense
of some human being, either from personal or unselfish interests,
having once been at work to make the woods still more attractive
and enjoyable. Benches of flat stones were raised at points where
snow-fields, fantastic and stern dolomite peaks and wooded slopes
formed exquisite pictures set in frames of stately, well-grown fir
trees--here a smooth lawn with its little shrine and wooden seat for
the wayfarer to meditate on the Flight into Egypt, which Jörgel called
the "witches' ground;" there, under a spreading tree, a rural table
and seats--proofs that we must be approaching the bath-house; and no
little were we pleased by these signs of care and judgment, especially
as none of the rural bowers were either bran-new or in a state
of decay, but harmonizing with the tidy negligence of the woods
themselves.

"These paths promise well for the baths," we remarked to Jörgel.

"Might have done so once," he replied, "but it was the old Frau
Wirthin who put them up. She was a woman with a head and a will, and
she took a pride in the place, seeing that the baths are as old as
the mountains, and they had been in her family since the Lord made
the Tyrol. Now they are in the hands of her son Seppl and his sister
Moidel. However, I never mix myself up in what does not concern me.