through meadows carpeted with flowers. On these meadows, a couple of
miles apart, lie the twin villages of the Ammer Valley--the one
world-famous, the other unheard of beyond the sound of its
church-bells--Ober and Unter Ammergau.

Long, straggling, Swiss-like towns, these villages on the Ammer meadows
are. You may find a hundred such between Innsbruck and Zürich. Stone
houses, plastered outside and painted white, stand close together, each
one passing gradually backward into woodshed, barn, and stable. You
may lose your way in the narrow, crooked streets, as purposeless in
their direction as the footsteps of the cows who first surveyed them.

Oberammergau is a cleaner town than most, with a handsomer church, and
a general evidence of local pride and modest prosperity. Frescoes on
the walls of the houses here and there, paintings of saints and angels,
bear witness to a love of beauty and to the prevalence of a religious
spirit. These pictures, still bright after more than a century's wear,
go back to the time when the peasant boy, Franz Zwink, of Oberammergau,
mixed paints for a famous artist who painted the interior of the Ettal
Monastery and the village church. The boy learned the art as well as
the process, and when his master was gone, he covered the walls of his
native town with pictures such as made men famous in other times and in
other lands. The spirit of the Italian masters was his, and the work
of Zwink at Oberammergau has been called "a wandering wave from the
mighty sea of the Renaissance which has broken on a far-off coast."

The Passion Play at Oberammergau has been characterized as a relic of
medieval times--the last remains of the old Miracle Play. This is
true, in the sense of historical continuity, and in that sense alone.
The spirit of the times has penetrated even to this isolated valley,