every-day level; no pretension, no attention; no claims, no consideration? And was it not more than likely that most of Mozart's misfortunes came from his peculiarly insignificant physique, in a day when "presence" counted for so much? What chance had this poor little fellow of holding his own against the robust, overtopping prince-bishop, the lordly Hieronymus von Colloredo, with his horses and hounds, his trains of swarming servants and retainers, and the bevies of magnificent women with whom he loved to surround himself? The same chance that a butterfly has amid the belchings of some soot-blackened chimney; the same chance that a bubbling spring has against the associated spades of a crowd of clod-heaving navvies. But that such a soul should have passed away singing, as we may say, and surrounded, in all literalness, by its mates, and that the body it left behind should have been carelessly hurried to the common trench The exasperated shopkeeper snatched her maltreated manuscript from the Governor's unconscious hand and laid it on top of the others, which had already been placed back in their box. The Governor put his sympathies into one pocket and got his purse out of another, and came away with such purchases as Zeitgeist's taste and acumen, added to his own, could contrive. But all the Mozart manuscripts were not in the hands of the laity, as it presently came to be discovered. Salzburg is nothing if not ecclesiastical, and there is quite a round of churches and convents for those disposed to make the most of the place. Some of these places are inaccessible to ladies, and some of them are quite out of the question for gentlemen; but at such as were practicable for both the Chatelaine's friends were able to note how easy it was for her to slide from the secular into the devotional. The unconscious simplicity of these transitions was viewed by Aurelia West with a kind of awed embarrassment; her own devotions were of course performed only at stated intervals and under circumstances conventionally correct; she herself was more or less unable to feel the efficacy of week-day prayer, and really preferred to worship in the company of other ladies gowned and bonneted for that purpose. It surprised her a good deal to see with what an indulgent interest these extemporaneous devotions, briefly undertaken in dusky corners, were regarded by the young men, for she knew that the Chatelaine's uplifted eye found no counterpart in either of them. Fin-de-Siècle, far from looking up to religion, looked down upon it, while Zeitgeist looked aslant at it with a level gaze that claimed to see the good and the bad in every system, and to weigh them quite coolly and indifferently against each But they both appreciated the devo other. tional as an element in the female character, In one of these churches, one morning, the The Governor's content was raised a degree higher still a little later in the day, as he was strolling among the clipped hedges and marble statues of the old archiepiscopal pleasance behind the Schloss Mirabella garden cut after the old French mode, and as little expressive of sanctity as are the fatigued gaiety and worldly charm of a wearied beauty just home from a ball. The Governor was all the time conscious that his was not the only pair of lungs breathing in the world-weary atmosphere of this sophisticated retreat, and he presently perceived, modestly hovering about behind a hedge of arbor-vitæ, a youth with a battered brown portfolio under his arm. The Governor was presently examining the contents of this portfolio (with an interest that did not quite rise to enthusiasm, however), and had soon committed himself to an appointment for the inspection of more Mozart manuscripts. On his return to his lodgings he found a most flattering note awaiting him from one of the dignitaries of the cathedral. A number of original manuscripts by the great Mozart had just come to light in the church library, and the Governor, as an eminent amateur, was invited to attend a private rehearsal from the same. The next day the Chatelaine made a visit to the Ursuline convent on the Nonnberg. The Lady Superior was more than gracious, and from her own private cabinet she abstracted a bit of music which she charged the Chatelaine to convey to her distinguished relative — a little song in the own, authenticated hand of their beloved Wolfgang Amadeus. When Bertha placed this offering in her godfather's hands the old gentleman gave a quiet sigh: for a lad was then waiting below for an answer to a note that he had brought from the shop in the Gstättengasse,-other Mozart manuscripts having developed in that dusky quarter; while before him on the table lay the prospectus of a publisher who was shortly to bring out a series of Mozart quartets, just discovered. When the Governor sallied forth next morning, a seedy-looking individual who had been waiting half an hour on the pavement opposite thrust his hand into the inside pocket of a shabby coat as he came stepping rapidly across the street. But the Governor turned his head the other way, and hurried on without stopping. It is not to be supposed that the Governor passively accepted the occurrences at Salzburg as a mere series of coincidences totally disassociated from any propelling cause; but it was not until Zeitgeist made some allusion to certain social movements on the part of Fin-de-Siècle and himself, during their stay in that town, that the old gentleman began to suspect the Count (finally assured of the real nature of the retreat near Constance) of having adopted retaliatory measures. At Salzburg, Zeitgeist was within a hundred miles of home, and many of the personages in residence there were well known to him; so on his making a casual allusion to Fin-de-Siècle's sudden quickening of the social spirit, and to the satisfaction which both of them had derived from a little round of visits, the Governor was able to formulate his theory. There was nothing in Fin-de-Siècle's course that he could really resent, for one may be gorged to-day yet recover his appetite to-morrow; but he sighed to think that the young man's desire for a revenge more immediate than adequate should have so irreverently involved the great master. However, the revenge had not been without its tinge of ingenuity, for it was a Gaul who had smitten a Teuton; but it pained the Governor to feel that just as Wagner was unable to escape the wrath of associated Frenchmen at home, so Mozart should have been unable to escape the malice of a single Frenchman abroad. But then there were satisfactions: the well-known facility of the composer, and his long residence in Salzburg, made it likely enough that all those purchases were genuine, and it was pleasant to see that the appreciation of a once-neglected genius was now so great and growing. However, no further complications ensued, for Fin-de-Siècle presently dropped away from the little party, as he had done before, and so came to no greater famíliarity with the Dolomites than he had enjoyed through Axenquist and his models. It was this collection that had first drawn their attention toward those peculiar manifestations in south Tyrol, and when Zeitgeist declared that he had already been over a part of the ground, it was agreed that he should conduct the rest of them over the ground, too. There was something in the fantastic and extravagant exaggerations of that region which started up all the latent Americanism in Aurelia West; and she, who had viewed the flowingly poetic outlines of the Alban mountains from the steps of the Lateran with no particular appreciation, had risen to an enthusiastic interest over the jagged pinnacles and splintered spires by which the brain-turned Swede had portrayed the wild and fantastic outlines of the Rosengarten and the Ampezzo-Thal. The Chatelaine, too, was willing enough to forego for a while the Doric severity of the Valais to wonder over the rigid and riven Gothicity in which rose Pelmo and Tofana, and Sorapis and Antelao, and Civita and Cristallo, and Marmolata and Hohe Schlern, and Croda Malcora a landscape in words alone. Already they saw those lofty and rugged valleys, hedged in by cloven precipices and rimmed with a raggedness of escarped battlements, and imaged to themselves a sèrried succession of pale and isolated peaks starting out dim and haggard through the dawn, or glaring crudely in the dazzling sunlight, or glowing threateningly in the red flush of sunset, or rising bare and desolate and spectral in the ghastly pallors of the moonlight. Meanwhile the Governor nervously handled his little hammer, and Zeitgeist was supposed to busy himself about the roads and the inns. Their week in the Dolomites was to be not a promenade, but a scramble-a thing as sumed by the mountaineering Zeitgeist and understood well enough by the Governor and the Chatelaine, but not dreamed of by the luxurious Aurelia, who smoothly inferred a succession of drives in properly equipped vehicles, and a regular series of four-franc dinners at table d'hôte-certainly nothing less than three. So by the time they had reached Cortina, and had sat down to dinner (as persons of distinction) on the landing, Aurelia began to experience a silent but deep-set sense of injury Rocchetta, indeed, rose invitingly across the valley; Tofana had graciously cast away its portentous cloud-drapery; Malcora opened wide its glacial and mysterious amphitheater: but all that went for nothing. For they had driven into town in a rasping, rattling, mudbespattered something, drawn by a pony and a mule, and their meager dinner of broth and lettuce-heads and omelets was placed before them on a rough table which no friendly will ingness, no anxiety to please, could smoothly cover or adequately fill. She looked protestingly toward the complacently unconscious Zeitgeist, at once the general of the expedition and its commissary, as if to ask why she should ever have been brought to this rude and benighted place. Poor child! she utterly failed to realize that she was dining in state in the capital of the district, on the line of the only highway by which the region was traversed, and she was mercifully spared the knowledge that what she had already undergone was indeed only a promenade compared with that she was yet to undergo. She rebelliously stirred her spoon around in her broth, and recurred with an intensified resentment to a little lecture which Zeitgeist had once read her for her scant appreciation of the fare and of the service of certain villages in the Haslithal and around Kandersteg. He had asked her to observe how anywhere in Switzerland, in town or hamlet, in places famous or obscure, one was certain of a good meal, well cooked and civilly served. She had tried to extinguish him by an account of a huge caravansary in the remote regions of buttes and sage-brush, where, five hundred miles from anywhere, she had found the electric light, a full orchestra, the telephone, and all the delicacies of every season. But he had not been greatly impressed; he had rejoined that it was the general average that counted, and that a civilization which grew up out of the ground was one thing, while a civilization fetched from afar on a mortar-board and slapped on with a trowel was another. Nowhere in her country, except in a few leading establishments in the great centers, had he found acceptable fare and attention, and nowhere was civility a certainty; an uncouth, insolent "independence" upset all calculations, and really nullified many an outlay; even those who would behave not always could. Whereas on the Continent every little place, however remote, however humble, could offer palatable fare, cleanliness, and courtesy. All this she remembered, and, remembering, rebelled, though still she did not openly complain. And on the morrow they left for another place-a worse one. For just after breakfast tidings of the most distasteful nature came to greet the Governorfrom Auronzo, too, their objective point. It had been their plan to pass around the great pyramid of Antelao on to Cadore and the Titian country generally, but the new intelligence decided him to push at once over the mountains to Caprile instead, in quite the opposite direc tion. The word was brought by a strapping young peasant, who had been tramping and scrambling across the mountains since daylight, and who had been impelled to this exertion by a visitor now at his native place — a forestiere, in general; a Frenchman, in particular; an elderly individual of a very exacting and peremptory disposition; a stout walker and a mighty wielder of the geological hammer; a man of scowls and pursed lips and severely sudden turns of the head; in other words, the worthy Saitoutetplus of Neuchâtel, whose message was that he was now in the Dolomites, that he had been trying to catch up with the Governor for the last three days, and that he might be looked for in Cortina within the next twenty-four hours. This news at once put the Governor in a tremor. The sensitive old gentleman had not met his colleague since that mortifying fiasco at Aventicum, nor did he feel himself able to face him even now. He took the presence of Saitoutetplus among the Dolomites as more than an unkindness as something almost equaling a cruelty. He had indeed known Saitoutetplus to describe himself as a grandnephew of the great Dolomieu, and had more than once heard him refer to a trip through south Tyrol as among the possibilities; but his presence here now could be accounted for only on the ground of an ungenerous desire to gloat over a friend whose ardent and imaginative nature had put him at a disadvantage. So within an hour the Governor and his friends had left Cortina - the cleanly, the cheerful, the Germanic for a long course of travel among the huddled and disheveled hamlets of Venetia, the Chatelaine seated firmly on a brown horse, Aurelia perched precariously on a sorry sorrel, the Governor straddled on an opinionative mule, and Zeitgeist trudging along on foot with the bearers of the baggage. It was a rigorous and diversified route, and led them across lofty alps and under melancholy groves of pine, through whose openings they glimpsed the pale distortions of distant Dolomites, and at one stage their guide condemned them to an hour's scramble up the rocky bed of a dried-up torrent. It was an ordeal for all of them; and the Governor, since he alone knew why it was all undergone, was the only one who was sustained by the feeling that what he was suffering by moving was much less than what he would have suffered by remaining at rest. Pelmo and Marmolata looked down with a stony indifference on all this anguish; and when they stopped at a chalet for the refreshment of milk, only to find the place barred and bolted, and to spy the inhabitants thereof swishing their scythes on the mountain-slopes a thousand feet above their heads, the martyred Aurelia seated herself on an upturned butter-tub, and openly lamented the lost luxuries of Cortina, whose cleanly rooms now stretched out like the great state apartments of some palace, whose broths and omelets were a banquet truly fit for monarchs, and whose brisk little felt-hatted kellnerinn was a ministering angel indeed. And it was sunset when the vast wall of Monte Civita flashed a rosy signal to them from its pompous, organ-like front, and the compact and dingy habitations of Caprile appeared in the valley below. The Governor and Bertha spent the next day in botanizing up the valley of the Livinalungo, while Zeitgeist made a solitary feint in the direction of the Marmolata glacier. Aurelia kept her room during the entire day, not because it was a close, low-ceiled little place, with a complete command of the noise, odor, and disorder of the stable-yard, but in spite of that; and she revived her flagging energies on a diet of broth evolved from a pair of skinny and sapless fowls, not because she liked it, but because it was that or nothing. And about half-past four there came a rap on the door, and a new misfortune developed when a letter, addressed to the Governor and brought across the mountains by one of the VOL. XLIV.-73. Cortina hostlers, was handed in to Aurelia as the sole representative of their party now on the ground. The handwriting of the address indicated great decision and indomitablere solution, and the last word ended with a big splutter that seemed the mingled symbol of haste, indignation, and a grim sense of ultimate triumph. When this missive was put into the Governor's hands, fear passed on to panic and his flight was turned into a rout. The persevering Saitoutetplus was sorry, he wrote, that his first message had arrived at a time when their preparations for departure had advanced so far as to make any further delay impracticable; he was anxious to see his friend for a scientific conference of considerable importance, and he should therefore come on at once to Caprile, arriving there next day at noon. The Governor at once informed Zeitgeist and the Chatelaine that important and unexpected intelligence made it necessary for him to reach Botzen on the Brenner as soon as possible,-conveying the impression that his letter had come from that quarter,—and that they must prepare to leave Caprile for Primiero before ten o'clock the next morning. The Governor scouted with an injured indignation the idea that Saitoutetplus's persecution had nothing behind it but a desire to discuss the geological origins of the Dolomitic region. Never would he meet the man if he could possibly avoid it; and if he were constrained to meet him in the end, still nothing, nothing in the world, could compel him to agree with him. If Saitoutetplus seemed disposed to uphold the coral-reef theory of the formation of the Dolomites, he himself should hold out for the theory of volcanic action, obsolete though it might be. If Saitoutetplus preferred the volcanic theory, then he should make up some new theory right out of his own head, -a thunder-and-lightning theory, for instance; a theory of crags splintering and crashing under the constant and concentrated fury of a thousand thousand forked and jagged thunderbolts—a theory, in fact, drawn from the heavens above and equally good with one drawn. from the earth beneath or from the waters under the earth. But as for anything like an agreement between them-impossible! The way to Primiero was a long and tangled succession of paths, lanes, footpaths, muletracks, wagon-roads, which led southward with faint hints of Italy in the dim blueness of distant valleys; but for the panic-driven Governor (whose every step was now taken for really no better reason than that it had a predecessor and so must have a successor) the dominant feature of the landscape was his redoubtable colleague of the college, who started up here, there, and everywhere. As they boated acrothe lovely lake of Alleghe, the Governor |