Here they were interrupted by the sacristan, very hurried, very worried, with a number of questions to ask and communications to make with regard to the festival. His reverence had to arrange, decide, and oversee; there was a deal to be done. "I think I ought not to monopolize you any longer," said Rodenberg. "The Herr Pastor appears to be in constant requisition. I will go up to the church for a while, to see how Saint Michael looks in his present surroundings. We shall have some quiet hours together this evening." "I am afraid that can hardly be. You do not yet know,--I was just going to tell you, but----" His reverence did not finish his sentence, for old Katrin came in at that moment with her arms filled with evergreens and garlands, and wanted to know where they were to be put, and the sacristan too stood waiting. Valentin was at his wits' end. Michael left him and took the familiar road to the pilgrimage church. It was early in May, and the mountains were beginning to show the presence of spring, always so late to arrive among them. The Eagle ridge was still girdled with ice, in dazzling crystal splendour, but the brooks from the glaciers, their chains broken by the sun, were dashing foaming down to the valleys, and the dark hemlock forest nestling against the rocky wall had already shaken the burden of snow from its boughs. From the alps and meadows surrounding Saint Michael the snow had also disappeared; they were laughing in fresh sunny green, while through them here and there trickled tiny rivulets from the heights; it was as if the whole mountain world had awaked to life. Still, however, above the heights and depths, above forest and meadow, the wild spring blasts were careering, sounding their note of promise and of victory. Michael entered the church, quite empty at this hour of the afternoon, but having donned its modest festal garment. Here upon these lonely heights there were no fragrant blossoms of the spring,--column and portal were wreathed about with dark evergreen, and little nosegays of Alpine flowers were the sole decoration of the altar. There was, nevertheless, a breath of spring in the solemnity reigning in the quiet, spacious structure, now filled with the golden light of the declining sun. The church might wear a more festal aspect when thronged with a devout crowd, but it was much more beautiful in the profound consecrated repose in which it awaited its festival, still untouched, as it were, by all the aspirations, prayers, and laments which would arise from within its walls on the morrow. No inharmonious sound disturbed its quiet; even the roaring of the wind outside, dying away in long-drawn notes, sounded like the tones of a distant organ.