In A Few Years'
Time, He Will Be Packed In Cotton-Wool In His Own Back-Parlour,
Labelled For The Place He Wants To Go To, And Unpacked And Taken Out
When He Gets There.
The railway now carries him round Mount Ettal
to Oberau, from which little village a tolerably easy road, as
mountain roadways go, of about four or five English miles takes him
up to the valley of the Ammer.
It was midnight when our train landed us at Oberau station; but the
place was far more busy and stirring than on ordinary occasions it
is at mid-day. Crowds of tourists and pilgrims thronged the little
hotel, wondering, as also did the landlord, where they were all
going to sleep; and wondering still more, though this latter
consideration evidently did not trouble their host, how they were
going to get up to Ober-Ammergau in the morning in time for the
play, which always begins at 8 a.m.
Some were engaging carriages at fabulous prices to call for them at
five; and others, who could not secure carriages, and who had
determined to walk, were instructing worried waiters to wake them at
2.30, and ordering breakfast for a quarter-past three sharp. (I had
no idea there were such times in the morning!)
We were fortunate enough to find our land-lord, a worthy farmer,
waiting for us with a tumble-down conveyance, in appearance
something between a circus-chariot and a bath-chair, drawn by a
couple of powerful-looking horses; and in this, after a spirited
skirmish between our driver and a mob of twenty or so tourists, who
pretended to mistake the affair for an omnibus, and who would have
clambered into it and swamped it, we drove away.
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