in the flesh, to be earthy, grimy, dull-eyed, and unintelligent? Florian Wood didn’t think so, however, or affected not to think so—which in his case was probably very much the same thing; for what he _really_ thought about anything on earth, affectation aside, it would have puzzled even himself not a little to determine. He was a tiny man of elegant proportions: so tiny, so elegant, that one felt inclined to put him under a glass case and stick him on a mantelpiece. He leant his small arms upon the parapet of a wall as they were approaching Zell, shifted the knapsack on his back with sylph-like grace, and murmured ecstatically, with a side glance at the stalwart peasant-women carrying basketfuls of fodder in huge creels on their backs in the field close by, “How delicious! How charming! How essentially picturesque! How characteristically Tyrolean!” His companion scanned him up and down with an air of some passing amusement. “Why, I didn’t know you’d ever been in the Tyrol before,” he objected, bluntly. And, in point of fact, when they started together from Munich that morning on their autumn tour, Florian Wood had never yet crossed the Austrian frontier. But what of that? He had got out of the train some five hours back at Jenbach station, and walked the sixteen miles from there to Zell; and in the course of the tramp he had matured his views on the characteristics of the Tyrol. But he waved one lily-white hand over the earth none the less with airy dismissal of his friend’s implied criticism. “How often shall I have to tell you, my dear Deverill,” he said blandly, in his lofty didactic tone—the tone which, as often happens with very small men, came most familiarly of all to him—“that you unduly subordinate the ideal to the real, where you ought rather to subordinate the real to the ideal. This, you say, is the Tyrol—the solid, uncompromising, geographically definite Tyrol of the tax-gatherer, the post-master, and the commercial traveller—bounded on the north by Bavaria, on the south by Italy, on the east by the rude Carinthian boor, and on the west by the collection of hotels and pensions marked down on the map as the Swiss Republic. Very well then; let me see if there’s anything Tyrolese at all to be found in it. I have instinctive within me a picture of the true, the ideal Tyrol. I know well its green pastures, its upland slopes, its innocent peasantry, its fearless chamois-hunters, its beautiful, guileless, fair-haired maidens. Arriving by rail to-day in this its prosaic prototype—cast up, as it were, from the train on the sea-coast of this Bohemia—I turn my eyes with interest upon the imitation Tyrol of real life, and strive earnestly to discover some faint points of resemblance, if such there be, with the genuine article as immediately revealed to me.” “And you find none?” Deverill put in, smiling.