The landlord led them upstairs and showed them two bedrooms on the first floor, roughly furnished, but neat, and, as Florian had foreseen, with a glorious outlook. Will proceeded to inquire, as interpreter for the party, about various details of price, possibilities as to meals, excursions in the neighbourhood, and other practical matters. The landlord answered all in the same self-respecting and almost haughty tone as before, assuring him in few words as to the excellence of the bread and the meat, the cleanliness of the beds, the soundness of the beer, and the advantages and respectability of his establishment in general. “You will be as well here,” he said, summing up, “as in New York or London—a little less luxury, perhaps, but quite as much real and solid comfort.” “What does he say?” Florian asked, languidly, as the landlord finished. For, though in his capacity as man of culture, the philosopher of taste was prepared to give a critical opinion offhand at any moment, on Goethe or Heine, the Minnesänger, or the Nibelungenlied, he was innocent of even the faintest acquaintance with the German language. Two words in it amply served his turn: with _wieviel_ and _ja wohl_, he made the tour of the Fatherland. Will explained to him in brief, and in the vulgar tongue, the nature of the landlord’s somewhat high-flown commendations. By way of answer Florian unslung his knapsack, which he flung on the bed with as much iron determination as his height permitted. “This’ll do,” he said, decisively—this time in his character as the man of impulse. “I like the house; I like the place; I like the view; I like the landlord. He’s a dignified looking old boy in his way, the landlord, with that independence of mien and that manly chivalry which forms an integral part of my mental conception of the Tyrolese character. No bowing and scraping there; no civilised flunkeydom. And that scar on his face, you observe; what a history it conceals: some free fight on the hills, no doubt, or some tussle with a wounded bear in his native forest!” “Wal, no; not pre-cisely that,” the landlord answered, in very Teutonic English, strangely tinged with an under-current of a most Western flavour. “I got that mark in a scrimmage one day on a Mississippi steamer. It was a pretty hard fight, with a pretty hard lot, too—he was a real rough customer—one of these professional monte-sharpers that go up and down on the boats on the lookout for flats; but I settled him, anyway. He didn’t want another when we’d squared accounts over that gash on my face. He retired into private life at the St Louis hospital for the next few voyages.” Poor Florian collapsed. This was too, too much! He sank on the sofa with a dejected face, drew a very long breath from the innermost depths of his manly bosom, and at last gasped out with a violent effort: “Are there no Tyrolese in the Tyrol at all, then?”