very few Jews seem to me an insufficient fuel to fire the
anti-Semites. How does their opinion flourish?'

'In this way,' he answered. 'The Jews, you see, ridicule our young men
for holding such superstitions as the Catholic. Our young men, thus
brought to book and made to feel irrational, admit the justice of the
ridicule, but nourish a hatred secretly for those who have exposed
their folly. Therefore they feel a standing grudge against the Jews.'

When he had given me this singular analysis of that part of the
politics of the mountains, he added, after a short silence, the
following remarkable phrase--

'For my part I am a liberal, and would have each go his own way: the
Catholic to his Mass, the Jew to his Sacrifice.'

I then rose from my meal, saluted him, and went musing up the valley
road, pondering upon what it could be that the Jews sacrificed in this
remote borough, but I could not for the life of me imagine what it
was, though I have had a great many Jews among my friends.

I was now arrived at the head of this lovely vale, at the sources of
the river Moselle and the base of the great mountain the Ballon
d'Alsace, which closes it in like a wall at the end of a lane. For
some miles past the hills had grown higher and higher upon either
side, the valley floor narrower, the torrent less abundant; there now
stood up before me the marshy slopes and the enormous forests of pine
that forbid a passage south. Up through these the main road has been
pierced, tortuous and at an even gradient mile after mile to the very
top of the hill; for the Ballon d'Alsace is so shaped that it is