So after breakfast they started up the narrow old road, paved in places with cobble-stones, and overarched in its lower slopes by graceful festoons of trellised vines, that leads from Meran along a shoulder of the hills to the earliest home of the counts of Tyrol. ’Twas a true South Tyrolese November morning. It froze hard through the night, and the ice still lay thick on the pools by the wayside; but in that keen, crisp air, and with that cloudless sky, the sun overhead blazed as warm as summer. Up the Passer valley to their right, as they mounted, the villages and churches on the slopes of the Ifinger stood out in dazzling white against their dark green background. The little mountain path, bordered as usual by countless petty crucifixes and whitewashed shrines, wound in continuous zig-zags up the face of the Küchelberg, a wedge of rounded rock that overlooks the town, draped with vineyards on its sides, and worn smooth on its summits by the titanic ice mills of the glacial epoch. The chapels in particular excited Florian’s interest. “There’s more religion to the square mile in the Tyrol,” he said, “than in any other country I ever visited!” They rose by slow degrees till they reached the long hog’s back which separated the wild Passer glen from the wider and more luxuriant Adige valley. Florian stood still to gaze. Tier upon tier of vines, in endless galleries, roofed the southern slope as with one leafy arbour; the long shoulder itself on whose top they now stood was green with pastures, and watered by plashing artificial leats which had worn themselves deep beds like natural streamlets. The music of falling water accompanied them all the way; the cow-bells tinkled pleasantly from the fields on either hand; and the views, as they walked along the crest of the ridge, looking down into the two valleys with their villages and klosters, their castles and towers, seemed infinite in the variety of their beauty and interest. Above soared the bare peaks of the Muthspitze and the Tschigatspitze; to the east rose the fissured summits of the cloven Dolomites; the white mass of the Lanser Ferner closed the glen to westward. After nearly an hour’s walk, as they approached the little village of Dorf Tyrol on the hill-top, they passed a huddled heap of wayside boulders, over whose ledge the stream that had accompanied them so far on their road tumbled from a small sluice in a bickering cataract. Two girls were seated on the brink of the torrent with their backs turned towards them. As the young men approached, one of the girls looked round, and gave a start of surprise. “Why, Linnet,” she cried in German, “here he is again!—your Engländer!”