In the Karch Range, they added three couple of oxen to our horses. Our long team, on the torrent waters and in the flooded ravines, looked liked a living bridge. The chain opposite the Tauern was draped in snow. [Sidenote: St. Michael.] On the 23rd, at nine o'clock in the morning, I stopped at the pretty hamlet of St. Michael, at the bottom of a valley. Some tall, good-looking Austrian girls served me with a very clean breakfast in a little room whose two windows looked out over meadows and the village-church. The grave-yard, which surrounded the church, was separated from me only by a rustic yard. Wooden crosses, with semicircular inscriptions and with holy-water fonts hanging from them, rose above the grass of the old tombs: five graves as yet unturfed proclaimed five new resting-places. Some of the graves, like the borders of kitchen-gardens, were adorned with marigolds in full yellow flower; wag-tails chased grass-hoppers in this garden of the dead. A very old lame woman, leaning on a crutch, crossed the cemetery and brought back a cross that had fallen down: perhaps the law permitted her to pilfer that cross for her tomb; dead wood, in the forests, belong to him who picks it up. Là dorment dans l'oubli des poètes sans gloire, Des orateurs sans voix, des héros sans victoire[243]. Would not the child of Prague sleep better here, without a crown, than in the chamber in the Louvre where his father's body was laid in state? My solitary breakfast, taken in the company of the satisfied travellers lying under my window, would have been to my taste if I had not been afflicted by too recent a death: I had heard the screams of the chicken served at my banquet. Poor young bird! It had been so happy, five minutes before my arrival! It was wandering among the grasses, the vegetables and the flowers; it was running about among the troops of goats come down from the mountain; to-night it would have gone to roost with the sun, and it was still small enough to sleep under its mother's wing.