Page:Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891).pdf/123

 "Do you believe them—the persons that you say tell you these tales?" I ask.

"Personally I do not," he replies. "I think people exaggerate to me because I look young and innocent, but no doubt there is a groundwork of truth in their statements. I have myself left Ober-Ammergau under a steady drenching rain, and found a cloudless sky the other side of the Kofel.

"Then," he continues, "you can comment upon the hardihood of the Bavarian peasant. How he or she walks about bare-headed and bare-footed through the fiercest showers, and seems to find the rain only pleasantly cooling. How, during the performance of the Passion Play, they act and sing and stand about upon the uncovered stage without taking the slightest notice of the downpour of water that is soaking their robes and running from their streaming hair, to make great pools upon the boards; and how the audience, in the cheaper, unroofed portion of the theatre, sit with equal stoicism, watching them, no one ever dreaming even of putting up an umbrella—or, if he does dream of doing so, experiencing a very rude awakening from the sticks of those behind."

B. stops to relight his pipe at this point, and I hear the two ladies in the next room fidgeting about and muttering worse than ever. It seems to me they are listening at the door (our room and theirs are connected by a door); I do wish that they would either get into bed again or else go downstairs. They worry me.

"And what shall I say after I have said all that?" I ask B. when at last he has started his pipe again.

"Oh! well, after that," he replies, "you can give the history of the Passion Play; how it came to be played."