On our last trip to the Mölltal, where, no matter what time of year it is, we have always enjoyed ourselves, we were in a tavern in Obervellach that had been recommended to us by a doctor from Linz and had not disappointed us and were chatting with a group of journeyman masons who had gathered at the tavern after work and were playing the zither and singing, thus reminding us once again of the inexhaustible treasures of Carinthian folk music. Late in the evening, the group of journeyman masons came and sat down at our table, and each one of them related something memorable or remarkable from his own life. We were particularly struck by the journeyman mason who reported that at the age of seventeen, in order to win a bet he had made with a fellow worker, he had climbed the church steeple in Tamsbach, which, as is well known, is very tall. I almost fell to my death, said the journeyman mason, and he expressly emphasized that because of this he had almost appeared in the newspaper.

Example

EXAMPLE

The courtroom correspondent is the closest of all to human misery and its absurdity and, in the nature of things, can endure the experience only for a short time, and certainly not for his whole life, without going crazy. The probable, the improbable, even the unbelievable, the most unbelievable are paraded before him every day in the courtroom, and because he has to earn his daily bread by reporting on actual or alleged but in any case, in the nature of things, shameful crimes, he is soon no longer surprised by anything at all. I will, however, tell you about a single incident that still seems to me the most remarkable event of my whole career as a courtroom correspondent. Ferrari, a judge on the Provincial Court of Appeals in Salzburg, for years the dominant figure in the Salzburg Provincial Court—from which, as I said, I reported on everything conceivable—after pronouncing a sentence of twelve years’ imprisonment and a fine of eight million schillings on, as he put it in his summation, a vile blackmailer, who was—I remember exactly—a beef exporter from Murau, stood up again and said that he would now set an example. After this unusual announcement, he put his hand under his gown and into his coat pocket as quick as lightning, pulled out a pistol on which the safety catch had already been released, and shot himself—to the horror of all those present in the courtroom—in the left temple. He died instantly.

Charity

CHARITY