Having spoken of the scenery, let us now speak of the guests.
There were not many. Frau T----, ourselves and a young woman, a
sewing-machinist, occupied the available chambers of the chalet.
The rest were used as receptacles for hay and milk: the ground floor
contained the _stube_, the kitchen, the pigstye, or rather the room
set apart for the pig, and the cow-house. Several poor guests, men and
woman, hovered about the door of the barn. They slept in the various
lofts, divided into rooms, and cooked for themselves in a common
kitchen adjoining the bath-rooms. These were two long wooden sheds, in
which rows of large tubs were placed. The patients bathed twice a day,
being covered over with boards and a horse-rug, but the head was left
free. There was no doctor: each could doctor himself by lying in the
hot water and drinking more or fewer glasses of the iron water daily.
It poured from a spout into a wooden trough between the chalet and the
barn; and this explained old Nanni's mutterings after our arrival.

Although the peasant bathers as a class made no distinct impression on
us, the half dozen men looking like facsimiles of each other, and the
seven women appearing always to be one and the same, still there were
one or two figures which stand prominently forth, from the more direct
relations into which we came with them.

First, an old peasant-woman, whom we heard, as we descended from the
Kronplatz, singing to a crying baby as we approached the house:

Engeli, Bengeli, wilt thou go to America?
Rumelti, Pumelti, wilt thou go to England?

She instantly stopped her ditty when she saw us emerge from the wood.