AUGUST lived in a little town called Hall. Hall is a favorite name for several towns in Austria and in Germany; but this one especial little Hall, in the Upper Innthal, is one of the most charming Old-World places that I know, and August for his part did not know any other. It has the green meadows and the great mountains all about it, and the gray-green glacier-fed water rushes by it. It has paved streets and enchanting¹ little shops that have all latticed panes² and iron gratings to them; it has a very grand old Gothic church, that has the noblest blendings of light and shadow, and marble tombs of dead knights³, and a look of infinite strength and repose⁴ as a church should have. Then there is the Muntze Tower, black and white, rising out of greenery and looking down on a long wooden bridge and the broad rapid river; and there is an old schloss which has been made into a guard-house, with battlements and frescos and heraldic devices in gold and colors, and a man-at-arms carved in stone standing⁵ life-size in his niche⁶ and bearing his date 1530. A little farther on, but[8] close at hand, is a cloister⁷ with beautiful marble columns and tombs, and a colossal⁸ wood-carved Calvary, and beside that a small and very rich chapel⁹: indeed, so full is the little town of the undisturbed past, that to walk in it is like opening a missal of the Middle Ages, all emblazoned and illuminated¹⁰ with saints and warriors¹¹, and it is so clean, and so still, and so noble, by reason of its monuments and its historic color, that I

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