Andreas Hausberger looked down at him with a half-pitying curl on those stern thin lips of his. Florian had attacked him lightly where his position was strongest. “That’s all right,” he said, slowly, with a chilly drawl—’twas his favourite expression. “And do you think then,” he went on, bursting forth almost scornfully, in spite of his outward deference, “we Zillerthalers get our fine singing voices and our musical ears by pure chance and accident? Not so, you may be sure of it. It’s no mere coincidence that our men and women can almost without exception sing like birds from their childhood upwards by the light of Nature. What gives them this power? Why, they live their lives long, in summer especially, in the thin clear atmosphere of our higher mountains. There isn’t much sour-stuff in it—what do you call it in English?—oh, oxygen, don’t you? Wal, there isn’t much oxygen in that thin upper air—rarefied, I think you say—and therefore they’re obliged to fill their lungs well and expand their chests”—he swelled himself out as he spoke, and showed off his own splendid girth to the fullest advantage—“and that gives them large reservoirs and rich, pure-toned voices.” “I never thought of that before,” Will Deverill interposed, much struck by the landlord’s plausible reasoning. “I suppose that’s why mountain races, like the Welsh and the Tyrolese, are so often musical. The rarefied air must tend to strengthen and develop the larynx.” “No; you never thought of that before,” Andreas Hausberger echoed. “You haven’t had to think of it. And you haven’t had to select and train a choir of our Tyrolese peasants. But I have thought of it for years, and satisfied myself it’s true. Is it for nothing, do you suppose, that on our cold mountain tops the vocal chords, as they say, are braced up and tightened? Is it for nothing that in that clear, pure, limpid air the very nerves of the ear, strained hard to catch quickly at distant sounds, are exercised and educated? Do you think, if I wanted to pick out voices for a musical troupe, I would go for them to Holland, or to Lombardy, or to Hamburg? No, no; I would go right away to the _gründe_ there, the upper forks of the Zillerthal, in the crystal air just below the glaciers, and pick out my best singers from the cow-boys and the alp-girls.” He spoke of what he knew and had long reflected upon. Acquaintance with his subject supplied in part the unimportant deficiencies of his English vocabulary; and, besides, he had said the same things before a dozen times over, to other English travellers. “Perhaps you may be right,” Florian responded, blandly, as the _wirth_ paused for breath in his eager harangue. It was a way of Florian’s to be bland when he saw he was getting the worst of an argument.