"Oh! Well, After That," He Replies, "You Can Give The History Of The
Passion Play; How It Came To Be Played."
"Oh, but so many people have done that already," I say again.
"So much the better for you," is his reply. Having previously heard
precisely the same story from half a dozen other sources, the public
will be tempted to believe you when you repeat the account. Tell
them that during the thirty year's war a terrible plague (as if half
a dozen different armies, marching up and down their country,
fighting each other about the Lord only knows what, and living on
them while doing it, was not plague enough) swept over Bavaria,
devastating each town and hamlet. Of all the highland villages,
Ober-Ammergau by means of a strictly enforced quarantine alone kept,
for a while, the black foe at bay. No soul was allowed to leave the
village; no living thing to enter it.
"But one dark night Caspar Schuchler, an inhabitant of Ober-
Ammergau, who had been working in the plague-stricken neighbouring
village of Eschenlohe, creeping low on his belly, passed the drowsy
sentinels, and gained his home, and saw what for many a day he had
been hungering for - a sight of his wife and bairns. It was a
selfish act to do, and he and his fellow-villagers paid dearly for
it. Three days after he had entered his house he and all his family
lay dead, and the plague was raging through the valley, and nothing
seemed able to stay its course.
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