"How everything has changed, Theresa!"
"Changed indeed—"
"I am not changed."
"Nor I."
"The winter, with its snows and its ice-blasts, is not more different from the summer, with its ripe fruits and sunshine, than the prospects of the Tyrolese now are, from what they were a few months, even weeks, ago!"
"No. Still I am glad we tried to free ourselves, though it did not please God to give us success. We can feel self-respect. Even our enemies must, I think, reluctantly respect us."
"Not they! Mark you, Theresa: I believe that when people lose self-respect, they also lose by degrees even the perception of what is respectable. Sometimes, o' nights, such big, swelling thoughts fill my head,—I think, 'Surely, what we have done, this Anno Domini Nine, will live? people will talk of it hereafter, when we have long been dead and buried?' And then I think, 'Ah, no! See how the emperor,—"our Franzel," as we used fondly to call him, who was most of all beholden to us, and who put us up to what we did,—'see how he has fallen off from us, like a snow-drift from the hill-side, that the river in the ravine below sweeps away for ever! See how it's the fashion already—how it was the fashion, even while we were winning glorious victories—for the Austrian counts and barons to look down on us, with a contemptuous pity, as a set of honest-hearted loggerheads!'—I say, you sir!" shouted Rudolf, interrupting himself, as he caught the twinkle of an eye gazing in upon them through a chink between the logs; and rushing out, he collared the spy, and gave him a good shake.
"Why, how now?" cried the intruder, who proved to be Franz. "What's this for?—what have I been a doing?"
"Spying and prying," said Rudolf, bluntly.
"Spying and prying?" quoth he. "Why, what have I come this long way all across the snow for, but to ask after the Sandwirth, and to offer Theresa a root of the gems-wurz, which, if he eats before sunrise, will make him bullet-proof? There now!"