The Monastery, Which Was Also Rebuilt At The Same Time, Now Serves The More Useful Purpose Of A Brewery.

From Ettal the road is comparatively level, and, jolting swiftly over it, we soon reached Ober-Ammergau.

Lights were passing to and fro behind the many windows of the square stone houses, and dark, strange-looking figures were moving about the streets, busy with preparations for the great business that would commence with the dawn.

We rattled noisily through the village, our driver roaring out "Good Night!" to everyone he passed in a voice sufficient to wake up everybody who might be sleeping within a mile, charged light- heartedly round half-a-dozen corners, trotted down the centre path of somebody's front garden, squeezed our way through a gate, and drew up at an open door, through which the streaming light poured out upon two tall, comely lasses, our host's daughters, who were standing waiting for us in the porch. They led us into a large, comfortably furnished room, where a tempting supper of hot veal- chops (they seem to live on veal in Germany) and white wine was standing ready. Under ordinary circumstances I should have been afraid that such a supper would cause me to be more eager for change and movement during the ensuing six hours than for sleep; but I felt that to-night it would take a dozen half-baked firebricks to keep me awake five seconds after I had got my head on the pillow - or what they call a pillow in Germany; and so, without hesitation, I made a very satisfactory meal.

After supper our host escorted us to our bedroom, an airy apartment adorned with various highly-coloured wood-carvings of a pious but somewhat ghastly character, calculated, I should say, to exercise a disturbing influence upon the night's rest of a nervous or sensitive person.

"Mind that we are called at proper time in the morning," said B. to the man. "We don't want to wake up at four o'clock in the afternoon and find that we have missed the play, after coming all this way to see it."

"Oh! that will be all right," answered the old fellow. "You won't get much chance of oversleeping yourself. We shall all be up and about, and the whole village stirring, before five; and besides, the band will be playing at six just beneath the window here, and the cannon on the Kofel goes off at - "

"Look here," I interrupted, "that won't do for me, you know. Don't you think that I am going to be woke up by mere riots outside the window, and brass-band contests, and earthquakes, and explosions, and those sort of things, because it can't be done that way. Somebody's got to come into this room and haul me out of bed, and sit down on the bed and see that I don't get into it again, and that I don't go to sleep on the floor. That will be the way to get me up to-morrow morning.

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