Читать книгу Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 4, April, 1886 - Various - Страница 3

The Austro-Bavarian Alps are perhaps unsurpassed in number and average height by any group of mountains in the world. There is always more or less snow on their summits, and as they are continually attracting the clouds and causing a changeable, capricious climate in their neighborhood, they may be said, like fashionable ladies, to have a different dress for every day in the week, and to look beautiful in whichever dress they choose to wear. They are beautiful when they stand out clear and sublime in the perfect sunlight of a cloudless day. They are beautiful in the night when the moonlight grows even more silvery from its contact with the snow upon their tops, or when there is no moon and the stars are rivalled by the bonfires which merry climbers have kindled upon their well-wooded sides. They were beautiful in the only thunder-storm I have seen during my residence among them, – their tops hidden by the clouds and the lightning flashing furiously down their sides, as if the thunderer of Olympus himself were hurling his bolts into the valley, while "a million, horrible, bellowing echoes" bounded and rebounded from mountain to mountain. And they were very beautiful on the day when I first heard this little legend which I am about to put into writing. It was raining in the valley, but yet it was possible to see more or less of all the mountains, and the summit of one of them was perfectly visible above the clouds that covered its sides. This was Frau Hütt, a peak whose shape bears a remarkable resemblance to that of a monstrous woman on horseback; and this is its legend as it was told to me by a very obliging kellnerin in the cosey little inn where I was sitting:

"Frau Hütt was a beautiful young maiden who lived in this very valley a great many hundreds of years ago, and one morning she determined to have her favorite palfrey saddled and take a canter up the mountain-side. It was a lovely morning and she was soon glowing with exercise and pleasure. She had passed over the lower part of the mountain, and was enjoying the merry, upward rush through the cool, fresh air, when she suddenly perceived a beggar standing in the road before her, with head uncovered and hands outstretched for alms. Now, Frau Hütt was a selfish, cold-hearted woman, and instead of checking her steed or turning him aside, she rode straight upon the helpless beggar, and in a very few seconds he was being trampled beneath her horse's feet and was spending his dying breath, not in praying for his soul, but in cursing hers.

"His curse took immediate effect. Frau Hütt was at once struck by remorse. The glow of exercise fled from her cheeks, and she began to feel chilly and faint, and to think of returning home; but she shuddered at the thought of repassing the beggar's mangled corpse. And when at last she attempted to check her steed and head him for the valley, she found with horror that the brute had acquired a will of his own and would no longer obey the bit; and when she tried to hurl herself from the saddle, it was only to discover that she was firmly fastened to her seat and could not move from it. So horse and rider rushed upward higher and higher, upward through the frosty mountain air and over the frozen mountain snow, and all the time Frau Hütt grew colder and colder, and felt the very blood in her veins ceasing to circulate, and her muscles becoming so stiffened that she could not even shiver. And when they had reached the summit of the mountain where people in the valley might best see her and be best warned by her fate, the palfrey rested, and Frau Hütt's whole body became what her heart always was, – stone.

"And even unto this day, once every year at a certain midnight, when the air is silent except for here and there the crowing of a cock, and the continuous gurgle of our rivers rushing to the sea, a mist arises from the muddy waters of the river Inn and thickens into a cloud and floats northward; and when it approaches Frau Hütt, it slowly takes the form of a beggar with head uncovered and hands outstretched as if for alms; and then the upper part of the mountain trembles visibly, just for all the world like a mortal shuddering in the presence of some ghastly horror.

"And have I seen this myself?" repeated our kind informant. "No, indeed; and I suppose if I were to ask the same question of the person who told me the story, he would reply, after the fashion of all ghost-story tellers, that his mother's first husband knew a gentleman whose aunt's next-door neighbor was reported to have seen it often. At any rate, one cannot easily watch for the spectre, because nobody knows the date of its annual appearance. 'And how in the world could a woman and her horse ever become so monstrously large as to form the peak of that great, big mountain?' Oh, that is easily answered. They did not become so. They always were so, for it all happened in the days of the giants."

Caspar Pischl.

Charles O'Conor. – "He went to Ireland and visited the seat of his ancestors at Belanagre, in Connaught, the result of which was that upon his return he changed the orthography of his name. Before that time he and his father had spelled Conor with two n's, but he then dropped one of the n's upon discovering that the family name was anciently spelled in that way. I was once asked if I knew why he had changed the spelling of his name from two n's to one, and I answered that he was descended from the Irish kings, and found, when he visited Ireland, that they spelled the name in that way, which information Mr. Nathaniel Jarvis, the witty Clerk of the Court of Common Pleas, who was present, supplemented with the remark that he supposed that the Irish kings had always been so poor that they had never been able to make both n's meet."