The Story of the Innumerable Company | Page 9

dreary or lonely.
And so it came to pass at last that men ceased to gather themselves in great bands. Nor did they longer set store on the sound of trumpets or the waving of flags. The men who were wisest ceased to be leaders of hosts. They became teachers and helpers instead.
And with all this a sure way was from day to day not hard to find. Men fell into it naturally and unconsciously. And the ways which are safe are innumerable as the multitude of those that may walk therein.
And those who had gone by diverse paths came from time to time together. Each praised the charms of the path he had taken, but each one knew that in other paths other men found as great delight. And as time went on many wise men passed over the way, and each in his own fashion left a record of all that had come to him.
But the old Chart men kept in ever-increasing reverence. They found that its simple, honest words were words of truth, and whoso sought for truth gained with it courage and strength. But they covered it no longer with their own additions and interpretations. Nor did any one insist that what he found helpful to himself should be law unto others. No longer did men say to one another, "This path have I taken; this way must thou go."
And some one wrote upon the Chart this single rule of the forest: "Choose thou thine own best way, and help thy neighbor to find that way which for him is best." But this was erased at last; for beneath it they found the older, plainer words, which One in earlier times had written there, "Thy neighbor as thyself."

THE STORY OF THE PASSION.
The Alps are not confined to Switzerland. They fill that little country full and overflow in all directions, into Austria, Italy, Germany, and France. Beautiful everywhere, these mountains are nowhere more charming than in Southern Bavaria. Grass-carpeted valleys, lakes as blue as the sky above them, dark slopes of pine and fir, over-topped by crags of gray limestone dashed by perpetual snow, the Bavarian Oberland is one of the most delightful regions in all Europe. When Attila and the Huns invaded Germany fifteen centuries ago, it is said that their cry was, "On to Bavaria--on to Bavaria! for there dwells the Lord God himself!"
In the heart of these mountains, shut off from the highways of travel by great walls of rock, lies the valley of the little river Ammer. Its waters are cold and clear, for they flow from mountain springs, and its willow-shaded eddies are full of trout. At first a brawling torrent, its current grows more gentle as the valley widens and the rocks recede, and at last the little river flows quietly with broad windings through meadows carpeted with flowers. On these meadows, a couple of miles apart, lie the twin villages of the Ammer Valley--the one world-famous, the other unheard of beyond the sound of its church-bells--Ober and Unter Ammergau.
Long, straggling, Swiss-like towns, these villages on the Ammer meadows are. You may find a hundred such between Innsbruck and Zürich. Stone houses, plastered outside and painted white, stand close together, each one passing gradually backward into woodshed, barn, and stable. You may lose your way in the narrow, crooked streets, as purposeless in their direction as the footsteps of the cows who first surveyed them.
Oberammergau is a cleaner town than most, with a handsomer church, and a general evidence of local pride and modest prosperity. Frescoes on the walls of the houses here and there, paintings of saints and angels, bear witness to a love of beauty and to the prevalence of a religious spirit. These pictures, still bright after more than a century's wear, go back to the time when the peasant boy, Franz Zwink, of Oberammergau, mixed paints for a famous artist who painted the interior of the Ettal Monastery and the village church. The boy learned the art as well as the process, and when his master was gone, he covered the walls of his native town with pictures such as made men famous in other times and in other lands. The spirit of the Italian masters was his, and the work of Zwink at Oberammergau has been called "a wandering wave from the mighty sea of the Renaissance which has broken on a far-off coast."
The Passion Play at Oberammergau has been characterized as a relic of medieval times--the last remains of the old Miracle Play. This is true, in the sense of historical continuity, and in that sense alone. The spirit of the times has penetrated even to this isolated valley, and its Passion Play is as much a product of our century as the poetry of Tennyson.