Welcome to Talk Story with John Whitehead. As usual, we have another interesting guest this afternoon. We have with us Joe Cahill-Louis. Cahill is the CEO of an organization that's committed to Hawaiian advancement, Native Hawaiian advancement. In fact, it's called the Console on Native Hawaiian Advancement. Welcome, Joe.  Yes. Thank you. You're driving me back. Yeah.  In fact, recently CNHA had a convention. It was called the Native Hawaiian Convention. Yes. It was almost every conceivable issue that one could find in the Hawaiian community was discussed or had played some part at the convention. Yep. So tell us a little bit about what you were trying to do and what happened and the rest of it. Sure. Last time I was on the show it was almost a year ago. All right. I had just started in the role as CEO. Yeah, so this is a year later. This is a year later. Yeah. Welcome back. One year in review. Okay. So yes, we just had our annual convention on about 1600 Native Hawaiians were registered and attended. We covered a number of different issues from Mauna Kea all the way to community organizing to policy issues that are facing Native Hawaiians. Basically, it was our think bank area to figure out how we want to go forward. Not necessarily depend on the system, but how do we solve problems amongst ourselves, Native Hawaiians, that we can go forward? That was a premise of the convention. Well, you know, one of the most interesting, I guess, discussion that I had the privilege of being there was this, there's a discussion about economic development and how Hawaiians could be a help in developing their own, I guess, enterprises. Tell us a bit about that, because that's kind of unique for your agency in the sense that you really work on a much broader field. Yeah. If I had to summarize what we do, it's more of a facilitator convener role. So we're an intermediary as well. What that means is we bring people to the table, resources to the table, and we find solutions to address a number of problems. So as it relates to economic development, you know, oftentimes networking with one another, identifying challenges and barriers that face businesses can be your actual answer to solving problems. So in this case, bringing Hawaiian businesses together to talk about what barriers they are facing and overcome and have overcome, right? Yeah. So the barriers they're facing and identifying solutions collectively to navigate them is very much a part of what I see our role is doing. So convening, facilitating discussions. I don't think I was in that room the whole time. So I don't know all the answers but you do. One of the interesting things about it was that you actually seem to either facilitate or make loans to Hawaiian businesses. In addition to our role as facilitator convener, CNHA is also a loan fund. So we operate a loan fund. We loan money to native Hawaiian businesses, whether they're incubators or they're micro enterprise businesses or they're small businesses, we lend them money. Oftentimes capital is the key to helping them open the door to a bigger market. Of course, we don't just give our money to anybody. We work with them to make sure. What is the criteria? Well, you've got to be a small business owner. You have to have a business plan and the business plan has to make sense. It has to work. We review all of that. You have to have cash flows that make sense and allow you to pay off the loan or pay back the loan. But we also help you. If that's not the case, we work with you to help strengthen your bond. That's the plus, right? That's what you add on the whole... We offer technical assistance to our small businesses. So we don't just give them money, we make sure they're successful with our money. How many businesses out there... We've lent about 128 native Hawaiian families to support their growth and development. We have $5 million that's revolving right now. So the money gets paid back. It goes to the next Hawaiian in line. Let me ask you a controversial question. Hawaiians have, I think, personally, I think gotten a bad rap for making these types of loans and not paying them back. Maybe not just Hawaiians. It's just small business people in general. Because it's tough out there. Let's face it. What's your... The key to that is oftentimes servicing the loan. You don't just give someone the money. You work with them while they have your money. You check in with them. Sometimes you have to be creative. You have to reconstruct the loan. For example, one of our business owners this month asked if they could defer their payments for a couple months. Sure, no problem. If it means a greater success for your business, then sure, what they needed the money for was to reinvest during the holidays so they had more inventory. It's about having products that make sense for your business. Not just, here's your business. Here's your payment schedule. If you don't, we're going to send... This is not welfare, in other words. The people got to put out and show that they're serious. Sure. And you got to have a system that allows them to succeed. It's not just black and white. You got to be flexible. So we have products that we change sometimes to accommodate the economy. So it could mean if a business owner is struggling, we suspend their payments for a few months. Whatever the circumstances may be, you as a loan fund have an obligation to support their long-term success. So we are flexible. Most banks are not. Right. And so your default rate is... Much less. So you would think it's higher because we deal with higher risk borrowers, but because we service the loans much more frequently than the business, the banks, because we follow up with them. Much more personally. It's much more. We know our borrowers. We know them. We know where they're at. They know where to come to us. We have a relationship. So that's the difference between us and your traditional bank system. And that to me has equal to greater success in the way we land. Well, you know, it's exciting because, and I don't, you know, I don't want to make comparisons, but you seem to be the state of Hawaii through its Hawaiian Homes program. And also, I guess, the as the state of Hawaii and the Office of Hawaiian won't do loans to individuals, but they haven't been having the success you have. Well, I've been trying to tell them, give us the money. We would lend it out, you know, because at the end of the day, they're state agencies. We all know state agency, what they do best is bureaucracy, right? They go up and down the pipe and they still can't figure it out. Right. But they know they have to go up and down the pipe. And they got all the money, too. So, you know, so they are just not set up, in my opinion, to support the situation facing our beneficiaries, our native Hawaiian community. And, you know, they're like for OHA, they have resources, they match resources with ANA. So, they're regulated. So, they're not as flexible as are what we call a CDFI, a Native Community Development Financial Institution. So, they don't have the flexibility that we have. They're also state agencies, procurement, all that stuff. The process, it goes through their accounting division, which they have, you know, rings to go around. Well, that's a great idea. I mean, here's something innovative for them, for people who are listening to consider. And that is, why not, in a sense, what you are is the private sector? So, why shouldn't these agencies use native Hawaiian private sector initiatives to get more economic development? Yeah. Well, we're working on it. We're working on some interim things for the Department of Hawaiian Homelands, maybe helping them package the loans, so that that portion of the work is not have, and doesn't go through them. We package it for them, and then they just review and approve. We're trying to find ways to make it happen. They're not, it's not that they're closed to the discussion. It's just, it don't move as fast as I want it to move, because there's need out there. People need access to money, and things are just not happening fast enough for them. So, tell us what else you're doing to improve the economics of, for native Hawaiian families. By the way, who qualifies as your beneficiary? Native Hawaiians. Our primary audience is native Hawaiian, so that the no blood quantum requirements, as long as you're native Hawaiian, we can service you. We also service non-Hawaiians as well. Really? Well, non-Hawaiian comes to our office. We're not going to say, no, we're going to assist them. If it's part of the ohana oftentimes, so a wife, a spouse, non-Hawaiian, of course we're going to help them. But our kuleana, as we see it, is to uplift the native Hawaiian community, and help them with a hand up, not necessarily a hand up. What is the big problem? I'm glad you said that, and it wasn't on my agenda. But I do want to discuss that, because one of the most traumatizing situations that I've seen occur with the Department of Hawaiian Homeland has been the situation that happens as often happens. Native Hawaiian homesteader marries a non-Hawaiian spouse. Obviously, he marries, so he has a non-Hawaiian spouse, and then passes away. The spouse who has put their entire life in making a home and keeping it, all of that, all of a sudden is not eligible for any kind of assistance. Yeah, the Department of Hawaiian Homeland, that is the structure that was passed down and delegated to the state by the Fed. However, there are some rights that the spouse has. I don't think everyone understands those rights. They have live-in rights. They have, you know, their children, of course, would be air, and the mom, the spouse who's non-Hawaiian, would have the right to remain in the home. There's some rights that they have, but yeah, at the end of the day, they also have the right to sell it if they want to. So there's some options that they have, not the best options, I would say, but there are some options available. Are you a homesteader? I am. Terrific. Were your parents homesteaders? My parents are homesteaders. My grandparents are homesteaders, so it's multi-generational. Of course, we have our own lease now out in Kapolei.  It's very community or life.  Okay, well, great. And I gotta tell you, I'm a homesteader too. So my dad was, but we waited forever to become homesteaders. My sister now lives on the homestead. But I'm really glad that your agency is focusing on the economic of Native Hawaiians. And what are the other areas? Oh, I know you do a lot of advocacy work. Yeah, so we have a policy shop as well. So we focus on Native Hawaiian advocacy. What that involves is essentially looking at systemic change, you know, ways in which we could address policies that are barriers to our success. So advocacy and working with our legislature locally as well as at the federal level, ensuring that Hawaiian voices are represented at both those levels. So our convention is tied into that. At convention, we identify priorities. Those priorities then circulated to our legislative bodies. So they know what the Hawaiian interest is this year. And I know that you had legislators attending. We had almost 30 of them this year at our convention. So that was great. Well, there's two issues, and we're going to take a small break now. But when we come back, there are two issues I want to get into. And that is the mixing. The first would be the mixing of economics and advocacy. Because, as I understand it, you were had a substantial involvement in the Aloha Poke controversy a few years ago. And also then get to, you know, and then just in general, what are some of the issues that we have for Native Hawaiians? So folks, we'll be right back in one minute with our guest, Kohio Lewis from the Council of Native Hawaiian Advance. Aloha, I'm Mellie James, host of Let's Mana Up. Tuesdays every other Tuesday from 11 to 1130. This show is meant to dive into stories of local product entrepreneurs and how they're growing their companies from right here in Hawaii. I'm so thrilled to have our show kicked off. And so please join us on Tuesdays at 11 o'clock as we talk to local entrepreneurs and hear their stories. Aloha, Stan Undergeman here. You can see me every Tuesday at 3 p.m. here on ThinkTech Hawaii. We're not on Friday anymore, so don't be looking for me on Friday. I'm on Tuesday at 3 p.m. here on ThinkTech coming to you live and direct from the beautiful studios in downtown Honolulu's Pioneer Plaza. So please join me and we'll talk everything about hydrogen and clean energy, not only for Hawaii but for the whole wide world. Aloha. Welcome back to Talk Story with John White and our guest, Kohio Lewis from the Council on Native Hawaiian Advance, but we were just going to have a little fun here. Now once in a couple of years or at least a year or so ago, I saw you handing out those selling t-shirts actually, saying something about Aloha is not for sale, you know, and doing community organizing. And so you are a very important part of the, I guess you would call it the Aloha Poké movement or something like that. I got involved. I got very involved. I was new in the role that I have now, but what we saw was cultural appropriation at its finest. You know, we saw a mainland chain restaurant copyright Hawaiian language and then send letters to Hawaiian businesses saying you can't use Aloha in the same sentence as your Poké. So you know, I was offended by that because who gave you the rights to our language? Right. So I did. I got together, a hui of us. It was a number of different organizations came together, but I funded some of the advocacy efforts. We flew to Chicago and we staged the big protest right in their downtown area. We marched. So what was the end result of that? Well, they stopped sending letters, cease and desist letters. I mean, it was a band-aid approach and we have, that's one of our priorities actually, is looking at how we can get into some form of legislation, some kind of protection, because this is not just happening to native Hawaiians. Yeah, because you know, by the way, that same organization has just opened up, like I heard a couple of hundred Poké stores across the United States saying Aloha Poké. What's mostly irritating for me is the thing is not even Poké in my opinion. Yeah, it's most tossed salad. Yeah, it's basically tossed salad with pieces of fish thrown in. But okay, so I don't want to kill it, but that was kind of, I know that you both got some degree of success with that. That's a form of advocacy that we do.  So we stopped them, I would say, from sending more cease and desist letters, but it's not the end of the road. We have to take our advocacy to another level. And you know, okay, that's a high boy. We're going into these different chains, but another chain we're talking with economics again, with economic development again, was that you also provide a lot of training for Native Hawaiians who want to upgrade their job skills. I saw something recently where you were developing apprenticeship programs for trades. Yeah, so the Council for Native, one of the things when I came into this role, I kind of restructured the organization a bit. And one of the priorities that elevated for me was job readiness, job training, raising income for Hawaiian families. That was the goal, right? How do we get our Hawaiians so they can live in the homeland? What I'm afraid of is 2020 census, it'll show more Hawaiians on the continent than back home here. That's a chance that might be correct. It's actually a good chance that that's going to happen. But the only way we can survive in our homeland is if we figure out how to raise our income, right? So again, paid $9 milk. Anyway, one of the ways in which we're doing that is through... $9 what? Milk. Really? I paid $9 the other day from it. Well, that's not because I was lazy and I would like drive down the road, but I bought it at $9. $9 at $711. Yeah, you're right. So, okay, tell me, what are the training programs? So we have, it's a number of training programs that help our young Native Hawaiian students. I don't say they're all young, 18 to 44 is our bracket. But we get them all the certifications that they need so that they can go into a trade. So for example... Are you working with the unions? Yes, we are. So for Carpentry, let's talk about that one. So Carpentry will put them through a 10-week course. It's only two hours a week. So if you do the math, it's 40-hour investment. They walk away from our program with OSHA certification, with respiratory training, forklift training, all of the basic things that they're going to need so that when they're going in for an interview, they are at the top of the pile because they have the certifications that they need. So they go into a deal with the apprenticeship program. It gives them a hand up. It gives them the basic things that they need to be successful in that career path. So, and it's free. We don't charge them for that. I want to thank Aloha United Way, by the way, because they funded, they seeded that program, as well as OMA. Yeah, so it's going very well. You also teach... I saw one of the advertisements were for policemen. They have a police program as well. So that program is about 11 weeks long. You go once a week every evening. You learn about the police academy and all of the elements within the police academy. So when you get in, you go right through. You'll find an A student. And we've already seen success. So we graduated 17 from that program. And already, I want to say, seven or eight have already gotten into the police academy and passed their entry test. So, for those of them. Okay. Well, we're talking about all these economics things. There's an elephant in the room, obviously. And because we have Native Hawaiians right now on Mauna Kea, which is influencing, I'm sure, a lot of conversations in the Native Hawaiian community. I don't want to decide the issue of Mauna Kea, except I did want to ask you, though, what effect Mauna Kea, the protectors of the Mauna, have had on your operation? Sure. Well, I would start off by saying you, of all people, would know what comes from activism. Our movement is on the backs of activism. So what we see before us right now is Hawaiians. This is our generation of activism. And the question is what is going to come from this or the greater movement of our Lahui. And so our organization has, to a certain degree, gotten involved, not deeply, but we've provided a platform for them to have discussions. We have provided resources. So that they can express what it is that they are doing, which is the first step toward communication. Yes. So to me, what we see coming out of Mauna Kea is a resurgence of Hawaiians identifying who they are and giving themselves a sense of place, a sense of a Hawaiian. And that is, I mean, it's inspiring. Even though no matter where you stand on the issue, when you see them come together and galvanize, you see 20,000 Hawaiians walking through Waikiki, it sparks a sense of place. There seems to be some consistency in the messaging, in the sense that the Hokulea went around the world, Malama Honua, which is taking care of the space that you're on or the planet. And even with Mauna Kea, you're talking about this taking care of the Aina. And so isn't that a message for more than Native Hawaiians, though? That's a message for a planet. Yeah. And I can tell you that I would consider myself, you know, I wouldn't say I'm Ku'e, Ku'e type of Hawaiian, you know, where you're always into that aspect. But I can tell you that I understand that what they are doing is necessary. It's necessary because Hawai'i, it makes you pause. And it makes you think more critically about our Aina. It makes you think about our state of place and whether things go on behind the scenes that shouldn't be going on. It makes you think more critically about society and the way it choices that have been made. And decision-making processes. So I commend our Kea'i. I think they've held it together really well. This concept of Kapu Aloha is something that we've all learned from as well. So I think there are some amazing gems that have come out of this movement already. Well, I tell you, and this is where I wanted to fold everything together in a sense. And that is that I heard one of the young men, and I don't know if he realized that somebody like myself would be listening to him talk and then pick out of his conversation something that I thought was really important. I mean, he didn't necessarily spend a lot of time on it. But what he said, which is I think folds into your objectives is that he said that they are about half or better native Hawaiians that now live on the mainland. And then I think that if we look at our total local population, people who were born here, I think more than half probably are on the, no, I shouldn't say mainland. And I apologize for using the word, but on the continent. Because we're the mainland. But on the continent, right? So all of these, and what he was expressing or trying to express was that when we, perhaps we need a new criteria in our how we evaluate benefit, like he said, like, you know, we constantly did. And this was more closer to what he was actually saying, which is, you know, we, we always talk about the benefits that something would bring us. So we have the we construct a new hotel, we we talk about the benefits, the jobs and so forth. And yet when we get done, more people have to leave because they can't afford to live here. So are we do we have the right criteria in the 21st century for islands in the middle of the Pacific? And I thought, man, that, you know, whatever you think of the program, that's a brilliant concept.  But they never put the next question, which is, and it may, and it may be that it'll benefit, but they never put the next question in. Yes, we'll accept all those benefits. But will it actually end up with more people being able to stay here or come back home? And I don't know whether we should be doing more of that with our policy decision. I think you're right. I think he's right. I think, you know, the reason why we all beyond Hawaiians love Hawaii is because of the natural beauty that it that it provides. I can tell you, I feel comfortable saying this is if Hawaiians weren't in the picture right now, this would be a very different Hawaii. You wouldn't have the beaches and the pristine environment. If Hawaiians weren't fighting them every step of the way, Hawaii would be completely different. So I think that causes pause for the whole structure to think about that, the criteria that you're setting rather than it putting it on a temporary value job. Or saying that economics are the most important thing, you know, or anything. And one way of looking at economics like the young man suggested was how many people will stay here? You know, I mean, we look at Kakaako. I don't want to talk about it. You know, we moved to Kakaako. Kakaako, you've got all this great economic development. And we all know very few local people, if any are still there, are going to be living in Kakaako. And Kakaako at one time was a busy industrial hub of shops and auto repair shops and all kinds of things.  So I'm hoping your advocacy deals with that kind. I think the road ahead is very interesting. The other thing I wanted to just mention as it relates to monarchy is, you know, I was saying it as I went down to Waikiki for that march through. And I stood on the side and I decided to just video as people were passing. And I was amazed at how many Hawaiians for what I kept saying to myself, my God, imagine if all of these guys voted. Yeah, right. All these Hawaiians voted. Like if you think about it, I mean, this is this is a perspective. Hawaii has 1.2 million eligible voters of that 640,000 actually vote. That's half. And I mean, that's registered, I should say. So of 1.2 million, well, it's about 600,000 eligible. Because 1.2 million is all. I think it's 1.6 million is everybody. Yeah. Anyway, my point is is 640,000 are registered to vote. It might have gone up in the last election. But of that 40, 43, 45 percent vote. So you're talking about this state being controlled by a little over 200,000 people. When we have over a million that are 10 percent, we're walking in Waikiki that day. Yes. So I mean, my point is, is 20,000 new fresh Hawaiian voters that send lightning rods to the system about the we can think more critically about Hawaii, about how we value our home and what is our values for change? All right. Well, I did want to thank you very much. Unfortunately, we got zeros buzzing at us. And so that means that time's up. But Kuhio, thank you so much for joining us. And I hope that you continue the good work that you have you and your actually your predecessors have started. Thank you. Thanks a lot.


Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequenton Valleys. The time at length came for leaving Capriol, for leaving Capriol and the Dolomites, and the pleasant, untrodden ways of southeastern Tyrol, and for drifting back again into the overcrowded highways of Italy and Switzerland. We were to re-enter the world at Botson. All roads, perhaps, led to Rome, when the golden milestones stood in the center of the known universe. So too all these central Dolomite valleys and passes may be said to lead, somehow or other, to Botson. We had plenty of routes to choose from. There was the comparatively new Char Road between Monte Latimer and the Rosengarten, known as the Caressa Pass. There was the way by Levina Lungo and the Gator Thal to Bruneck, and the rail from Bruneck to Botson. Again we might follow the long line of the Avicio through the Fassa, Fiamme and Sembre Valleys, to Lavisse, where the torrent meets the Isic, and the road meets the railway, not far from Trent. Or we might make for the Grodner Thal and the Cicer Alp, and strike the Brenner Line at Outswang, a little above Botson. We decided upon the last. It had many advantages over the other routes. It would take us first along the whole valley of Levina Lungo, show us the cella massive from three sides of its vast circumference, carry us to St. Ulrich, which is to South Tyrol in respect of the wood-carving trade, what Interlochen and Breen's are to Switzerland, carry us over the Cicer Alp, close under the shadow of the Langkulfel, the Platt Kogel and the Schlein, give us an opportunity of visiting the baths of Ratzes, and finally land us at Botson in about a week, or even less, from the time of starting. We parted from friends when we parted from the hospitable pezzies, and went away promising ourselves and them to return again soon to Capriol. The morning at five a.m. was cool and bright, but we had already been waiting some days for more favorable weather, and the sky was still unsettled. The church bells were ringing as we rode out of the village, and the usual procession of remonstrance was winding up towards the church. This time they were going to pray for dry weather. Che, Che, said Clementi contemptuously. That is the way they do, Signora. The paroco watches his barometer, and when the rain is near falling, he calls the people together to pray for it. Perhaps it comes down in the middle of the mass. Then he cries, Echo, Iu, Miracolo, and poor devils, they believe it. As far as Finnazor's little inn at Andras, our road lay over-ground already traversed. Then we crossed the torrent, left the valley of Buchenstein, opening away to the right, and skirting now the rising slopes of the Col di Lana, continued our course up the main valley of La Vinolungo. At the large village known indifferently as La Vinolungo and Piav d'Andres, we paused for an hour to feed the mules, and were served with excellent coffee in the cleanest of wooden rooms by the fattest of cheerful landlady's. These people are also Finnazor's, and their opposite neighbors, who likewise keeping in are Finnazor's, which is more the perplexing as the one albergio is really comfortable, and the other of doubtful report. The good one, however, lies to the eastward, that is to say, to the right of a traveler coming up from Capriol. The village, which is the capuolungo and post-down of the district, hangs on the verge of a steep precipice, and stands nearly fifteen hundred feet higher than Capriol. The view from the church terrace is quite magnificent, and not only commands the deep cut course of the Cor de Val from its source at the head of the valley down as far as Capriol, but brings in the Cevita, the Marmalata, the Monte Padon, or Missola, the Sella Massive, and a host of inferior peaks. From Piav d'Andres, as far as Araba, a dismal-looking wooden hamlet at the foot of the slopes below the southeastern precipices of the Sella, the valley rises slowly and steadily. As it rises, it becomes barren and uninteresting. The jagged peaks of Monte Padon, emerging gradually from their hood of sullen clouds, show purpley black against the sky. By and by the winding way having brought us, somehow, in a line with the Valfi Orantino, and higher than the intervening slopes of Monte Frisale, we are greeted with an unexpected view of the Palmo. Shadowy, stately, very distant, it closes the end of an immensely long and glittering vista. We see it for a few moments only and for the last time. As the path trends inward, it vanishes, as the Cevita and the Marmalata have by this time also vanished. We shall see them no more in the course of the present journey, and who can tell when, if ever, we shall see them again.  The mass seems naturally to divide itself into the five blocks respectively entitled the Boe, or Portois Spitz, closing the head of the Fossathal. The Sella Spitz, looking up the Grodenathal. The Pisa del Spitz, overhanging the Colfaso Pass. The Mesor Spitz, facing Corfara and the Gatorthal. And the Campolungo Spitz, dominating the Campolungo Pass, which we are now approaching. As we strike northwards up the Bear Call to the right, leaving Araba and the Valley of Levinolungo far below, we have these huge impending bastions always upon a left. The trees up here are few and stunted. The Alproses are all off, and only the Bear Bushes remain. The Golden Lilies, the Gentians, the rich wildflowers that made most of the other passes beautiful, are all missing, and only a few scant blossoms of Edelweiss hide themselves here and there among the moss-grown boulders. The mowers are at work, however, on all the slopes, getting in the meager hay harvest and singing at their work. First one voice, then another, takes up the yodel. It is echoed and flung back from side to side of the valley, now dying away, now breaking out again, sweet and liquid and wild as the notes of a bird, which no doubt all these Swiss and Tyrolean melodies were originally imitations. Now, as we near the top of the Call, new mountains come rising on the northern horizon. The Santa Croce, or Heligan Croats, a long mountain terminated towards the west with a couple of twin peaks, like a cathedral with two short spires. The domes shaped Ferella Berg, and the Sass Unger, or Sassander Coffle, which is in reality an outpost of the Gernenzene Massive. Just as we have reached the top of the Pass and begun to descend, a long rumbling peel of distant thunder rolls up from the Levinna Lungoside, and looking back we see the clouds gathering fast at our heels. Down below, in a green, lonely hollow, lies Corforra, consisting of about a dozen houses and a tiny church. The way is steep and soft and slippery. The mules can hardly keep their feet. The storm is coming up. So we hurry and slide and stumble on as quickly as we can, and arrive presently in the midst of thunder and lightning at the door of Ratanera's Alberto.  The new house is reserved for travelers of the better class, and contains neither public room nor kitchen. The family occupy the old house, cook in it, and there entertain the guides and peasant travelers. The new house is made of sweet, fresh, bright pine wood. The upstairs rooms are all wood, floors, walls, and ceilings alike. The ground floor rooms are plastered and whitewashed. Who would have dreamed of finding art in such a place? Who would have dreamed that the grave-old peasant covered with flower-dust, who just now led the mules to the stable, was the father of a young painter of unusual promises? Yet it is so. Franz Ratanera, the son of our host, is an art student at Vienna.  The first thing one sees on going upstairs is a full-length figure of hofer on the wall in colors, life-size, admirably drawn with a banner in his right hand and his rifle slung to his shoulder. In the largest bedroom, one end of which serves for a dining room, hang some capital oil studies of still life, and several clever heads and crayons. And down below, in a sort of lumber room where the wet cloaks are hung to dry, every inch of whitewashed wall is covered with graffiti—heads, arms, hands, caricatures, full-links, half-links, Frederick the Great, Gotha, Schiller, Mignon, Mephistopheles, Hamlet, the torso of the Belvedere, the fighting gladiator, the wild huntsman, and many more than I can remember or enumerate. The pretty little madshin who serves our dinner is never tired of answering questions about Mein Bruder-Nachveen. He painted those two still-life pictures when he was here last summer and the hofer fresco four years ago. He was always drawing from earliest boyhood and studied at Munich before he went to Vienna. He is at home now, came home last night to serve his annual month with the Corfera Rifle Corps, and has just gone over the hill to see friends at some neighboring village. Here in the day, when he returns from over the hill, the young artist at my request pays us a visit. He is not yet five and twenty and is shy as a girl. We talk a little about art, but as Herr Franz is not very strong an Italian and as the writer's German is limited, our aesthetic conversation is necessarily somewhat dislocated. I could gather enough, however, to see that he is all the study industry, the patient ambition, and the deep inward enthusiasm of a German art student, and I believe he is destined to make his mark by and by. CHAPTER XIV. CORFARA is, of course, over the Austrian border, and its people are as thoroughly Austrian as if Campadelo and Capriol were not each within a few hours' journey. Herr Franz is the only member of his family who speaks Italian. Neither old Ratanera, nor his daughter, nor any soul about the village except the priest, understands a syllable of any language but their own. The great surprise of Corfara, however, is its church. It is not wonderful, after all, to find a solitary genius springing up here and there, even in the wildest soil. Not many miles from Titian's birthplace we found the Gueninas. In the valley where Bruce Siltoland was born we came upon the young wood sculptor of Bregoriza. It is not, therefore, so surprising that Corfara should produce its painter. But it is certainly somewhat startling when, having strolled out by and by after the storm has tailed off into a dull drizzle, we peep in at yonder, tiny, humble-looking church and find ourselves in the midst of the most lavish decorations. Here where one would have expected to find only whitewash, our walls covered with intricate medieval diapering, shrines, altars, and tryptics loaded with carved and painted saints, and gorgeous with profuse gilding, stalls, organloft and seats elaborately sculptured, all in the most ornate style of early German Gothic, all apparently new, all blazing with burnished gold and glowing with color. The sight of this splendor is so amazing that for the first few minutes one can only wonder in silence, and that wonder is increased when, happening presently to meet the priest, we learn from him that all these adornments are the work of the peasant population of the place, of those very haymakers whom we heard singing this morning in the hay, designed by them, carved by them, painted by them, gilded by them, and the pious free will offering of their hands. It is a small place, and the inhabitants do not number more than two hundred and sixty or two hundred and seventy souls, children included, but, says the priest, smiling, they are all artists. He is a gentlemanly priest, and expresses himself in very choice Italian. He speaks of corfora in a smiling, well-bred, deprecating way, as a lost, out-of-the-way spot, and of the church, though one would think he must feel proud of it, as pretty for so poor a place. When I praise the decorations he shrugs his shoulders, and implying that better might have been done with larger means. One good thing we have, though, he says, which the senioras have not seen, but which I shall be pleased to show if they do not mind the trouble of returning. So we turn back, this interview having taken place just outside the churchyard gate, and re-entering the church, follow him to the back of the altar, where are a pair of painted doors now folded back out of sight, but brought round to the front, he says, in lent, and closed over the face of the altar. These paintings represent the decoration of St. Catherine, to whom the church is dedicated, and according to the parochial were executed in the fourteenth or fifteenth century by an artist named Tassini, who, as the story goes, and it is always the same story with these village treasures, being detained at Corfara by stress of weather, painted these pictures and presented them to the church in return for the hospitality of the priest. Beyond this our parochial has nothing to tell. He knows no more than I who this Tassini was, when or where he lived or whence he came. No mention of him occurs in the comprehensive volumes of Crowe and Cavalcassell on painting in North Italy, and his works at Corfara obtain not a line of notice in the pages of Ball's Guide, or of M. Gilbert and Churchill's Dolomite Mountains. I, who never even heard of him before, can only judge from the style of his work that he was a North Italian of the Belliniste School. The paintings, which are of course on panel, are executed in a brilliant, crystalline early style, and recall the work of Memling even more than the work of the Frullian painters. The St. Catherine, slender, round-faced, and fair, is quite of the German type, while the exquisite finish of the costumes, the delicate use of the gilding, and the elaborate treatment of patterns and textures remind one of Carlo Crivelli. Four other paintings, also on panel, representing St. Catherine and other saints, adorn the front of the altar. His works, deeper in tone, but evidently belonging to the same period, are supposed by the priest to be by some other hand. At all events they are all interesting, while the larger paintings at the back are unquestionably of rare beauty and value.   Returning presently to the inn, just as the drizzle thickens and the light begins to fail, we encounter a phenomenon. It stands in the little yard between the albergue and the des pendants, discoursing and gesticulating in the midst of a group composed of the ratineras, our guides, and a few miscellaneous men and stable boys. It wears hylos, a battered straw hat, and a brown garment, which may be described either as a long kilt or the briefest of petticoats. Its hair is sandy, its complexion crimson, its age anything between forty-five and sixty. It carries a knapsack on its back and an alpin-stock in its hand. The voice is the voice of a man, the face, tanned and travel-stained as it is, is the face of a woman. She is gabbling German, apparently describing her day's tramp across the mountains, and seems highly gratified by the peals of laughter which occasionally interrupt her narrative. A guide, she exclaims, replying to an observation of some bystander. Not I! What do I want with a guide? I have carried my own knapsack and found my own way through France, through England, through Italy, through Palestine. I have never taken a guide, and I have never wanted one.  Fatigue is nothing to me. Distance is nothing to me. Danger is nothing to me. I have been taken by brigands before now. What of that? If I had had a guide with me, would he have fought them? Not a bit of it. He would have run away. Well, I neither fought nor ran away. I made friends of my brigands. I painted all their portraits. I spent a month with them, and we parted the best comrades in the world. Hug! Guides, indeed. All very well for incapable, but not for me. I am afraid of nothing, neither of the pope nor the devil. But startled by this tremendous peroration, we go in and leave her discoursing, and I don't know that I have ever experienced a more lively sense of gratification and relief, than when I presently learned that this lady is a German. She is no stranger, it seems, at Corfara, but appears every now and then in this mad fashion, sometimes putting up at the Ratanarras for several weeks together. She paints, she botanizes, and I think they said she writes. Giuseppe, who describes her as a signora, molto brutte e molto alegra, tells next day how she subbed that night at the Guides' table and entertained them hugely. The way from Corfara to St. Ulrich lies along the Gator Thal, through the village of Colfasco, and up a high and lonely valley between the Gara de Naza and Sela Massives. There was not a living soul in Colfasso as we rode through, nothing but a ghastly, attenuated Christ on a house-side, nearly as large as life, and splashed horribly as if with blood from head to foot. The whole village was out on the hills, the oldest and youngest at work with the strongest getting in the hay. From above Corfara and as far as the top of the pass, our path lay close under the tremendous precipices of that part of the Stella, known as the Prisidus Spitz. The mountain on this side assumes magnificent proportions, preserving always its characteristic likeness to a titanic fortress, and showing now and then, through clefs in those giant ramparts, glimpses of a great snowy plateau within, with here and there a blue fold of downward creeping glacier or a fall of misty cascade. As we mount higher, the last patches of corn and flax give place to a broad, desolate space of boggy turf, intersected by a network of irregular cattle tracks, and scattered over with scores of wooden crosses. These mark where travelers have been found dead. They say at Corfara that this Colfasco call is the most dangerous of all the Dolomite passes, and that the wind in winter rages up here with such fury that it drives the snow and sleet in great clouds which bury and suffocate men in cattle in their progress. There is also no defined path, and the bog is everywhere treacherous. And now the summit reached and passed, the land coffal rises on the left above woods and hilltops, a vast, solitary tower with many pinnacles. A sheltered gorge, thinly wooded with fir trees, opens before us. The long, impending rain begins again, hard and fast, and the path becoming soon too steep for riding, we have to dismount and walk in a pelting storm down a steep mountainside to Santa Maria Gardenia, which is the first hamlet at the head of the Grodener Thal. Here we put up at a tiny austeria till the sky clears again and then push on for St. Ulrich. Our way lies now along the Grodener Thal, green and wooded and sparkling with villages. The cella is gradually left behind. The land coffal becomes more lofty and imposing. The Platte Cogo, like a half-dome, rises into view. The wooded slopes of the Cicer Alps close in the valley on the left, and the schlern, as seen for the first time through a vista of ravine, shows like a steep black wall of rock, flecked here and there with snow. Every last trace of Italy has now vanished. The landscape, the houses, the names and signs above the doors are all German. The peasants we meet on the road are square set, fair, blue-eyed and boorish. The men carry wooden crazen on their backs, as in Switzerland. Unmistakable signs and tokens now begin to tell of the approach to St. Ulrich. The wayside crucifixions are larger, better carved, better painted, and some are picked out with gold. By and by we pass a cottage outside the door of which stands a crate piled high with little wooden horses. In the doorway of another house a workman is polishing an elaborately carved chair.  And now the capital of Toyland comes in sight, an extensive, substantial-looking hamlet scattered far and wide along the slopes on the right bank of the torrent. The houses are real German Tyrolian homesteads, spacious, many-windowed, with broad eaves and bright green shutters, and front gardens full of flowers. There are two churches, a little old, lower church, and a large, smart upper church, with a bulbous belfry tower painted red. And there are at least half a dozen inns, all of which look clean and promising. The whole place, in short, has a bright, prosperous commercial air about it, like a Swiss manufacturing town. Here at the gas-house of the White Horse we are cordially received by a group of smiling girls, all sisters, who show us into excellent rooms, give us roast beef and prunes for supper, and entertain us with part-songs and zitter-playing in the evening. CHAPTER XIV. That night there came another thunderstorm, followed by three days of bad weather, during which we had more time than enough for inquiring into the curious trait of the place and seeing the people at their work. For here, as I have said, is the capital of Toyland. We had never even heard of St. Ulrich till a few weeks ago, and then but vaguely, as a village where wooden toys and wayside cries were made, and now we find that we have, so to say, been on intimate terms with the place from earliest infancy. That remarkable animal on a little-wheel platform which we fondly took to represent a horseback, with an eruption of scarlet discs upon his body, and a mane and tail derived from stippings of ancient fur-tibet, he is of the purest grown-northal breed. Those wooden-jointed dolls of all sizes, from babies half an inch in length to mothers of families two feet high, whose complexions always came off when we washed their faces, they are the aborigines of the soil.  Those boxes of landscape scenery whose frisly cone-shaped trees and rubbed houses stood for faithful representations of tempeh in the veils of Arcady. At Noah's Arc, a Tyrolean homestead in a boat, in which the animals were truer to nature than their live originals in the zoological gardens, that monkey so evidently in the transition stage between man and ape, that spends his life toppling over the end of a stick. Those rocking horses with an armchair, fore and aft, that drae with immovable barrels, those wooden soldiers with supernaturally small waist and triangular noses. All these, all the cheap, familiar absurd treasures of your earliest childhood, and of mine, they all came, reader, from St. Ulrich, and they are coming from St. Ulrich to this day. They will keep coming when you and I are forgotten, for we are mere mortals, but those wooden warriors and those jointed dolls bear charmed lives and renew forever their indestructible youth. The two largest wholesale warehouses in the village are those of Herr Perger and of Mistress Insum and Printh. They show their establishment with readiness and civility, and I do not know when I have seen any sight so odd and so entertaining. At Insum and Printh's alone we were taken through more than thirty large storerooms, and twelve of those were full of dolls, millions of them, large and small, painted and unpainted, in bins and cases, on shelves, in parcels ready packed for exportation. In one room, especially devoted to Liliputians, an inch and a half in length, they were piled up in a disorderly heap, literally from floor to ceiling, and looked as if they had been shot out upon the floor by cartloads. Another room contained only horses. Two others were devoted to carts. One long corridor was stocked with nothing but wooden platforms to be fitted with horses by and by. Another room contained dolls' heads. The great dusk attic at the top of the house was entirely fitted up with enormous bins, like a wine cellar, each bin heaped high with a separate kind of toy, all in plain wood waiting for the painter. The cellars were stocked with the same goods, painted and ready for sale. Now, the whole population of the place, men and women alike, being with few exceptions brought up to some branch of the trade, and beginning from the age of six or seven years, the work is always going on and the dealers are always buying. It is calculated that, out of a population which, at the time of the last census, numbered only three thousand four hundred ninety-three souls, there are two thousand carvers, that is to say nothing of painters and guilders. Some of these carvers and painters are artists in the genuine sense of the word, others are mere human machines who make toys, as other human machines make matchboxes and matches. A smart doll-maker will turn out twenty dozen small-jointed dolls one inch and a half in length per diem. And of this sized doll alone, measures insum and printth by thirty thousand a week the whole year round. The regular system is for the wholesale dealers to buy the goods direct from the carvers, to store them till they are wanted, and to only give them out for painting as the orders come in from London or elsewhere. Thus the carver's work is regular and unfailing, but the painters being dependent on demands from without is more precarious. The warehouses of Herr Perger, though amply supplied with dolls and other toys, contain for the most part goods of a more artistic and valuable kind than those dealt in by Mr. Insum and Printth. All the studios in Europe are furnished with lay figures large and small from Herr Perger stores, and even with model horses of elaborate construction. Here also range solemnly all the length of dimly-lighted passages stand rows of beautiful saints, large as life exquisitely colored, in robes richly patterned and relieved with gold. Saint Cecilius, with little model organs, nightly Saint Theodorus in glittering armor, grave lovely Saint Christopher's with infant Christ's upon their shoulders, Saint Florian's with their buckets, Madonna's crowned with stars, Nun-lite Mater Dolorossos, the evangelists with their emblems, Saint Peter with his keys, and a host of other saints, angels, and martyrs. In other corridors we find the same goodly company reproduced in all degrees of smallness. In other rooms we have Christ's of all sizes and for all purposes, colored and uncolored in ivory ebony in wood for the benetier, for the oratory for the church altar for the wayside shrine. Some of these are perfect as works of art, faultlessly modeled and in many cases only too well-painted. One life-sized recumbent figure for a pietà was rendered with an elaborate truth, not to life but to death, that was positively startling. I should be afraid to say how many rooms full of smaller Christ we pass through in going over the upper stories of Herperger's enormous house. They were there, at all events, by the hundreds of thousands, of all sizes, of all prices, of all degrees of finish. In the attics we saw bends after bends of crowns of thorns only. One day was devoted to going from house to house and seeing the people at their work. As hundreds do precisely the same things, and have been doing them all their lives, with no ideas beyond their own immediate branch, there was inevitable sameness about this part of the pilgrimage, which it would be tedious to reproduce. I will, however, give one or two instances. In one house we found an old, old woman at work. Magdalena palled off by name. She carved cats, dogs, wolves, sheep, goats, and elephants. She has made these six animals her whole life long and has no idea of how to cut anything else. She makes them in two sizes and she turns out, as nearly as possible, a thousand of them every year. She has no model or drawing of any kind to work by, but goes on steadily, unerringly, using gouges of different sizes, and shaping out her cats, dogs, wolves, sheep, goats, and elephants, with an ease and an amount of truth to nature that would be clever if it were not so utterly mechanical. Magdalena palled off learned from her mother how to carve these six animals and her mother had learned in light manner from the grandmother. Magdalena has now taught the art to her own granddaughter, and so it will go on being transmitted for generations. In the adjoining house, Aloia's sonner, a fine stalwart brown man in a blue blouse, carves large Christs for churches. We found him at work upon one of three-quarters life-size. The whole figure, except the arms, was in one solid block, fixed upon a kind of spit between two upright posts so that he could turn it at his pleasure.  It is a sight to see her sonner at work. He also has no model. His block is not even pointed, as it would be if he cut in marble. He has nothing to guide him save his consummate knowledge, but he dashes at his work in a wonderful way, scooping out the wood in long flakes at every rapid stroke, and sending the fragments flying in every direction. But then Aloia's sonner is an artist. It takes him ten days to cut a figure of three-quarters life-size, and fifteen to execute one as large as life. For this last the wood cost him fifteen florins, and his price for the complete figure is forty-five florins, about four pounds ten shillings English. In another house we found a whole family carving skulls and crossbones for fixing at the bases of crucifixes, not a cheerful branch of the profession. In other houses families that carved rocking horses, dolls, and all the toys previously named, in others families of painters. The ordinary toys are chiefly painted by women. In one house we found about a dozen girls painting gray horses with black points. In another house they painted only red horses with white points. It is a separate branch of the trade to paint the saddles and headgear. A good hand will paint twelve dozen horses a day, each horse being about one foot in length, and for these she has paid fifty-five soldy, or about two shillings and threepence English. I have dwelt at some length on the details of this curious trade, for the reason that, although it is practiced in so remote a place and in so traditional a way, it yet supplies a large slice of the world with the products of its industry. The art is said to have been introduced into the valley at the beginning of the last century, no doubt on account of the inexhaustible supply of arolas or penis sembra yielded by the forest of the Gros-Northal, the wood of which is peculiarly adapted for cheap carving, being very white, fine-grain and firmed, yet soft and easy to work. The people of St. Ulrich have lately restored and decorated their principal church, which is now the handsomest in South Tyrol. The stone carving and external decorations have been restored by hair plieselventura of Bricson, and the painted windows are by Nykessar of Innsbruck. The polychrome decorations are by hair part of St. Ulrich, the large wooden statues are by hair mug neck, also of St. Ulrich, and the smaller figures on the altars and pulpit, as well as the wood sculpture generally, are all by local artists. Color and gilding have, of course, been lavishly stowed on every part of the interior, but the general effect is rich and harmonious and not in the least overcharged. Above the high altar hangs an excellent copy of the famous Florentine Madonna of Simibui. The dialect of the Gros-Northal, called the Latin tongue, is supposed to be directly derived from the original Latin at some date contemporary with the period of Roman rule. It differs widely from all existing dialects of the modern Italian, and though in some points closely resembling the Raito Romanche of the Grissons and the lower Romanese of the Angadine, it is yet, we are told, so distinctly separated from both by well-marked differences, both grammatical and lexicographical, as to indicate kinship rather than identity of stock. Those, however, who admit with stub the unity of the Ration and Attraction languages, and who agree with Niber in believing the Rations of these Alps to have been the original Etruscan stock, will assign a still remoder origin to this singular fragment of an ancient tongue. It certainly seems more reasonable to suppose that the tide of immigration flowed down originally from the mountains to the plains, rather than that the aboriginal dwellers in the fertile flats of Lombardy should have colonized these comparatively barren Alpine fastnesses. This view the writer ventures to think receives strong confirmation from the fact that a large number of sepulcher bronzes distinctly Etruscanan character have been discovered at various times within the last twenty-five years in the immediate neighborhood of St. Ulrich. These objects collected and intelligently arranged by Herr Perger may be seen in his showroom. They fill two cabinets and comprise the usual articles discovered in graves of a very early date, such as bracelets, rings, fibulae, torques, earrings, weapons, et cetera. Philologists may be interested in knowing that there exists a curious book on the Groedner Thal in its language, with a grammar and vocabulary of the same, by Don Joseph Vien, a native of the Faça Thal and present parochal of St. Ulrich. From St. Ulrich to the Cicer Alps, the way leads up through a wooded ravine known as the Puffler Gorge, weary of waiting longer for the weather, we start at last on a somewhat doubtful morning, and find the paths wet and slippery, and the mountain streams all turbid from the rain of the last three days. Neat homesteads decorated with frescoed saints and Madonna's, and surrounded like English cottages with gardens full of beehives and flowers, are thickly scattered over the lower slopes towards St. Ulrich. These gradually diminish in number as we ascend the gorge, and after the little lonely church and hamlet of San Pietro cease altogether. Hence, a long and steep pull of about a couple of hours brings us out at last upon the level of that vast and fertile plateau known as the Cicer Alps, the largest and certainly the most beautiful of all these upper Tyrolian pasture mountains. Scattered about with clumps of dark fir trees, with little brown chalets, with herds of peaceful cattle, with groups of haymakers, and watched over by a semi-circle of solemn, gigantic mountains, it undulates away, slope beyond slope, all greenest grass, all richest wildflowers for miles and miles around. Yonder to the southwest the great plateau rolls on and on to the very foot of the schlern, which on this side looms up grandly through flitting clouds of mists. A low ridge of black and sheltered rocks, called the Rossan or horse-jaw, from its resemblance to a row of broken teeth in a jawbone of rock, connects the schlern with the north end of the Rossan garden range, as well as with the southern extremity of the Cicer Alps, and with the ridge out of which rose the Platt Kogel and Long Cuffle. But the Rossan garden is quite hidden in the mists that keep flying up with the wind from the side of Boatson. The Long Cuffle, however, stern and solitary with a sculpture of festoon of glaciers suspended above a deep cleft in the midst of its bristling pinnacles, and the Platt Kogel, crouching like an enormous toad with its back towards the schlern, show constantly, sometimes singly, sometimes both together, sometimes in sunshine, sometimes in shadow, as the vapors roll in part. A vast panorama which should comprehend the Marmalata and Tofana, and many a famous peak beside, ought to be visible from here. But all that side is wrapped in clouds today, and only the cella, and gardens on a massive stand free from vapor. Now and then the curtain is lifted for a moment towards the west, revealing brief glimpses of wooded hills and gleaming valleys, bounded by far mountain ranges, blue, tender and dreamlike as if outlined upon the sunny air. But, apart from the view at commands of its three nearest rivers, the Langkuffle, Platt Kogel, and Schlern, the great sight of the Cicer-Alp is the Cicer-Alp. Imagine an American prairie lifted up bodily upon a plateau from 5,500 to 6,000 feet in height. Imagine a waving sea of deep grass taking the broad flood of the summer sunshine and the floating shadows of the clouds. Realize how this upper world of pasture feeds from thirteen to fifteen hundred head of horned cattle contains three hundred herdsman's huts and four hundred hay chalets. Supports a large summer population of hay-makers and cowherds and measures no less than thirty-six English miles in circumference, and then, after all, I doubt if you will have conceived any kind of mental picture that does justice to the original. The air up here is indescribably pure, invigorating and precious. Given a good road leading up from Cice or Castel Ruth and a fairly good hotel on the top, the Cicer-Alp, as a mountain resort, would beat Montegeneroso, Albus Brun, Selixburg, and every other somo-frisch on this side of Italy out of the field. The peasants of these parts preserve a vague tradition of a prehistoric lake, said once upon a time to have occupied the center of this alpine plateau. A legend which gains some color from the fact that were it not for the gap of the Puffler Gorge down which the drainage flows to the Grodner Thal, there would at this present time be a lake in the depression on the summit. Having wandered and lingered up here for nearly a couple of hours, we at length begin descending by the course of the Chippetschbach, a torrent flowing down the deep cleft that separates the Cicer-Alp from the northwest face of the Schlearn. Coming presently to a cheesemaker's hut a few hundred feet below the edge of the plateau, we call our midday halt. A bench and a table are accordingly brought out and set in the shade. The good woman supplies us with wooden bowls of rich golden-colored cream. The mules graze, the guides go indoors and drink a jug of red wine with the herdsman and his son. The mists roll away, and the huge eq wheels of the Schlearn start out grandly from above the woods behind the chalet, as if on purpose to be sketched. From this point down to the bath-houses at Ratzes, the way winds ever through fur forests that exclude alike the near mountains and the distant view. About half way down we pass within sight of the ruined shell of Schloss Hounstein, once the home of Oswald of Wolkenstein, a renowned knight, traveler, and minus-singer, who was born in the year 1367, fought against the Turks at Nicopolis in 1396, was present at the storming of Schutze in 1415, encountered innumerable perils by land and sea in the Crimea, in Armenia, Persia, Asia Minor, Italy, Spain, England, Portugal, and the Holy Land, and died here in the castle of Hounstein in the year 1445. He was buried in the church of the famous abbey of Nusfitt near Brixton, where his tomb may be seen to this day. His love songs, hymns, and historical ballads are published at Innsbruck, collated from the only three ancient manuscript copies extant, one of which belongs to the present Count Wolkenstein, one to the Imperial Library at Vienna, and one to the Ferdinandium at Innsbruck. A more rough and primitive place than the little bath-house of Ratzes it would be difficult to conceive. It lies at the foot of those tremendous egg-wheels which we just saw now from the Herdsman's chalet, but we have come down some 1800 feet since then, and now find ourselves at the doors of a building that can only be described as two large wooden chalets united by a covered gallery. The bathrooms occupy the ground floor and the bedrooms the two upper stories. A tiny chapel, a small bowling ground, one large general's space cell, where eating, smoking, and card-playing are going on all day long, and a tumbledown dependance about three hundred yards off for the reception of the humbler class of patients, complete the catalogue of the attractions and resources of Ratzes.  For here in the establishment a small bedroom measuring ten feet by eight, containing a straw-stuffed bed, a wooden tub, a chair, a table, a looking-glass the size of a small octavo volume, and no scrap of carpet or curtain of any kind is the best lodging they have to offer. The mistress of Ratzes, a lively, clear-headed business like Widow with nine children, makes up seventy beds in the bath-house and could find occupants for seventy more if she had more space. Her customers are, for the most part, small tradesmen and their families from Boatsen and peasant farmers from the neighboring villages. Two springs, one impregnated with iron and the other with sulfur, supply these visitors with baths and medicine. There is a priest in daily attendance but no doctor, and the patients appear to choose their springs at haphazard. The baths are of the simplest kind, mere pine wood boxes cough and shaped with wooden lids just reaching to the chin of the occupant, and a wooden shelf inside to support the back of his head. These boxes ranged side-by-side in rows of eight or ten, fill a succession of gloomy, low-roofed basement chambers, and look exactly like rows of coffins in a series of dismal vaults. This impression is heightened very horribly when the unwary stranger, peeping timidly in, as I did, through a wide open door, sees ahead solemnly peering up from a coffin-lit in a dark corner, and hears a guttural voice saying in sepulchre accents, Guthinabend, One night at Ratz's is enough, and more than enough to satisfy the most curious traveler. Of its clatter, its tobacco smoke, its overcrowded discomfort, its rough accommodation, one has in truth no right to complain. The place such as it is suits those by whom it is frequented. We who go there neither for sulfur nor iron nor to escape from the overpowering heat of Bootson are, after all, intruders, and must take things as we find them. We leave Ratz's the next morning at half-past nine, having to be down at Atswang by two p.m. to catch the train for Bootson. The morning is magnificent, but we are all sad today, for it is our last journey with the two nestles. The path winds at first among fur forests, rounding the base of the great aguils, and passing a ghastly clef of ravine, down which a huge limb of the schlearn crashed down headlong, only twelve years back, strewing the gorge, the pastures, and all the mountain slope with masses of gigantic debris. Now, still and always descending, we pass farms, hamlets and churches, pear and cherry orchards, belts of reddening wheat and bearded barley, and come at last to an opening once there is a famous view. From here we look over three great vistas of valley, northwards up the Kuntersveg as far as Brixton and the Brenner, southwards towards Trient and the Valdinand, northwestward along the wide path of the upper etched in the direction of Meran. At the bottom of a deep trench between tremendous walls of cliff, close down beneath our feet, as it seems, flows wide and fast the gray tide of the Isaac. The high road that leads straight to Verona shows like a broad white line on this side of the river. The railway, a narrow black line burrowing here and there through tiny rabbit holes of tunnel runs along the other. A whole upper world of green hills, pasture alps, villages, churches, corn lands and pine forests lies spread out like a map, along the plateaus, out of which those three valleys are hewn, and beyond this upper world rises yet a higher, all mountain summits faint and far distance. From this point the path becomes a steep and sudden zigzag. It is all down, down, down. Presently we come upon the first vineyard and hear the shrill cry of the first Sikala. And now the rushing sound of the Isaac comes up through the trees, and now we are down in the valley, crossing the covered bridge, dismounting at the station. Here is Antzwang, here is the railway, here is the hot, dusty, busy, dead level world of commonplace again. At Antzwang we part from Clementi and the mules, Giuseppe going on with us to Botsin. Clementi is very loathed to say goodbye, and El, albeit unused to the melting mood, exchanges quite affecting Adjus with fair Nestle. As for Dark Nestle, Callus to the last, he shakes his ears and trots off quite gaily, evidently aware that he has finally got rid of me and rejoicing in the knowledge. And now, arriving at Botsin, we arrive also at the end of our Midsummer Ramble. For a week we linger on in this quaint old medieval town. For a week the pinnacles of the Schlearn and the Grand Facade of the Rosengarten yet look down upon us from the heights beyond the Isaac. As long as we can stroll out every evening to the old bridge down behind the Cathedral and see the sunset crimsoning those mighty precipices, we feel that we have not yet parted from them wholly. They are our last Dolomites, and from that bridge we bid them farewell. End of Section 37 End of Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequited Valleys Amid Summer Ramble through the Dolomites by Emilia B. Edwards Read by Cibella Denton, August 2007


Hello everyone, my name is Nikhil Gajam, working as assistant professor in department of computer science and engineering in Balchand Institute of Technology, Sallapur. In today's session, we will see exception handling in Python. Learning outcome, at the end of this session, student will be able to write a Python script for handling an exception. What is exception? Generally, there are two types of errors are there, one we call it as normal errors and second one is exceptions. Error is generally which are occurring during compile time and then exception which are occurring during execution time. So what is exception? Exceptions are special events which are handling or occurring during execution of your program, which are because of the user input generally or may be program errors are also occurring which causes an exception generally. So an exception is an event which occurs during execution of your program that disrupts the normal flow of program's instructions. You can defend your program by placing a suspicious code inside a try block and then after try block include an accept statement. So how to handle this exception? In Java you have try cache block, in Python you have try and accept block. So if you think that this is a suspicious code or exception may be occur during the execution of your program, all the statements generally you are including inside a try block. If exception occurs then control will be jumped to the accept block and execution will be or the statements which are present inside accept block will be executed. So all the suspicious code which you think that exception may occur during execution of your program, all the statements generally belonging to try block and if exception occurs then accept block will be executed. If exception does not occur in the try block then accept block will not be executed. So this is how you are handling the exception in Python. Now there are some examples of exceptions as divide by zero exception. Suppose you have written a code for division of two numbers and suppose second number is zero. So obviously division is not possible so this is an exception. So this is not the fault of actually a programmer. Programmer has written the correct code but the value which is entered by the user a second value is zero. So division is not possible so this is an exception. Suppose another exception may be a file not found. Suppose you have written a code for reading the file or writing content into the file. And suppose during execution suppose that file is not present at the particular location. So this is an exception occurred during execution of your program. So these are the some examples of exceptions in Python. So how to handle that? So you have a try and accept block. In Java you have try and catch block, in Python you have try and accept block. So this is the syntax for try and accept block. So there is generally a single try block is present and multiple accept block may be there for a particular try block. So try then colon, then all the statements belonging to try those are inside this try block. And generally you include all the statements you think that exception may be occur those statements are included in the try block. Then accept exception 1, then block of this code of exception 1, then accept exception 2, then block of the code for this exception 2. So this multiple accept block may be present in your Python file. Then other code may be also present. So common exception these are the common exceptions. First one is zero division errors. This happens when you have written the code for division of two numbers and second number is zero and occurs when a number is divided by zero. Obviously is divided by zero it is not possible. A second one is name error. It occurs when name is not found it may be a local or global. Third one is indentation error. If incorrect indentation is given then exception is indentation error. Then IO error it occurs when input output operation fails and end of file error. It occurs when end of file is reached and yet operations are being performed. So we have we will see one example zero division error and how to write a try and accept block in Python. So this is Python. Suppose I will take two numbers from the user a equal to int then input then enter this is number one then b equal to int input then enter number two then result equal to a divided by b and then print result equal to comma result. This is your common program. But how to include now try and accept block inside this program. Generally you know that exception may occurs for this line for this statement. So what I will write I will write this inside try block. So this is try. This is my try block and then accept block. So this is accept. This is print. I am printing error message. This division by zero is not possible. This is try and accept block. We will execute this. Suppose enter number one, number one is suppose ten, number two is suppose five. So output is two. So number one is ten, number two is five obviously division is possible. So result will be calculated as two and it is printed. No accept block will be executed. What happens suppose I will give number two as zero suppose number one as ten and number two as zero. Now when I have entered number two as zero zero will be stored inside b. So result equal to a divided by b so ten divided by zero it is not possible not possible. So this is an exception. Exception occurred for this statement. So next statement is not executed control will automatically jump to the accept block in this case. Next is whatever statements you have written inside accept block that will be executed. So in accept block there is only one print statement that will be printed. So generally try and accept block generally you are writing you are including in your program to handle the exception. If exception is occurring and still you want to print some messages to the user or you want to handle the program or to close the connections of database or to close the collections of files generally that's why you are writing and try and accept block. We will move forward. Next one apart from try and accept there is finally block is also present. So Python provides an optional final statement which is used with the try and accept block. It is executed no matter what exception occurs and used to release the external resources. The finally block provides guarantee of execution. So syntax is like the try then code accept then code then finally then code. As we know if exception is not occurring in the try block accept block will not be executed. If exception is occurred in the try block somewhere so all the statements after that that statement will not be executed control will directly jump to the accept block. What finally block is there finally all the statements inside finally block will be executed irrespective of whether exception occurring during execution of your program or not. So what code you write generally inside finally block whatever connections which are related to database or related to files generally you are closing statements you are writing inside a finally block. So irrespective of whether exception may occur in the try block or may not occur a finally block will be executed. So this is about finally block then accept statement using with the exception variable. So you can declare a variable for exception also for printing what type of exception is there you can use the variable also. In this case suppose this is a try block and this is accept exception as E. So exception it is all type of exception may handled by this exception class. Instead of writing divide by 0 error or IO error something like that generally you write exception. It will handle all type of exceptions. So exceptions as exception as E. So E is a variable name in this case. So I have printed a kind divide by 0 and then print E. So E is a variable name it will print what type of exception occurred during execution of your program. So you can store the exception inside a variable also in using this way. So think and write you can pause the video and you can answer for this question. Gaze the output if A equal to 0 and B equal to 0. This is try block A equal to int input enter A, B equal to int input enter B. Suppose A equal to 0 and B equal to 0, C equal to A divide by B, print A divide by B accept exception print can't divide by 0 then finally block is there. You can pause the video and you can answer. This question is value of B is 0 exception occurs for this statement control will jump to the accept block it will print can't divide by 0 after accept finally block will be executed. So it will print program ends here. So output for this program is can't divide by 0 it is a statement which belongs to accept block and program ends here it is a statement which belongs to finally block. So this is output of this program. So these are the references I have used for this video. Thank you.


Okay, so I will talk about error correction because the words coding theory might be a bit misleading But yeah, we'll see Yeah, so So let's say you are sitting here with your mobile phone and you want to send a nice picture to your friend in Amsterdam for example who is Uva is when we said free Amsterdam some whatever some computer in Amsterdam and This is how it looks like if you try to do it from Linux So just tracing the root of the packet just but here's just basically sim packet But maybe not everyone and send was going on there. So here is how it like happens in Geographical perspective so the packet from tar to first it goes from your phone It goes most probably to this white thing, which is access point From there then it goes to the university server Then I'm not sure exactly if the server is connected directly to Talin, but or maybe not but anyway Soon it end up in Talin Then your packet is sent to Hamburg most probably on the bed of the Baltic sea and then from Hamburg Somehow it goes to Frankfurt on mine and then finally it goes to Amsterdam And then also a couple of points in Amsterdam, but it's local already And of course you when you send the picture like I know like in what's up You don't want to wait ages and you want it to be sent very quickly But he also wanted to be sent without mistakes. So you want your friend receive on that side the same thing you've sent But the problem is that in every communication Media in the cable in the air here in whatever is Satellite communication whatever there is always something which is called noise like we are known we are used to know what noise is In real life like just when you sit in the pub with a friend and talk and there are a lot of people talking you the noise is just something which Which makes your conversation a bit more difficult But a bit more passionate because you need to speak louder But this the same exactly effect happens in the as I said in cables or like in fiber optics in basically Anything when you transmit any data information So for example, let who knows who's that Yes, it's our order heaven So what let's say for example you want to send this picture And let's say all that the total amount of errors from your phone here because as I said there are a lot of noise From here with all this route to Amsterdam. Let's say 15% 10 15% which is actually very mild Estimate so what you get after is something like this if you don't do anything you just send as it is So like let's say so here basically what I did I just took 15% of the pixels on the picture. Just make them white So this is what you not really fancy, right? I mean like maybe 50 years ago people would be really happy to get this in one second even less in Amsterdam But not not nowadays Yeah, so We'll not show the video because actually I managed to find Because another type of data transmission is Writing data and reading data and one of the examples is a compact disc a bit archaic now But I found the reader so we can have kind of live presentation So it was invented by the end of 80s usually mostly by Phillips and Sony Phillips in Netherlands and Sony in Japan Yeah, so Here every all the data is encoded with the error correction techniques, which you will talk which is the idea of this talk but first like demonstration so In theory if you damage if you scratch the disc it should still work fine So does it yeah, thank you So let's say like I feel like a magician So we take the disc and like let's let's scratch it's like Do you see it's scratched I hope it will play after so in theory it should play again after this Of course if windows allows it to play If you can hear So please fine It's actually not original dungeon. Uh, yeah, so I hope you were a bit impressed by this presentation like live Yeah, so you've seen I scratch it quite severely So the point is that how does it happen how? So the idea is actually behind this the same so in the first In the first case you Kind of send your data, but here you also kind of send it But you send it like you send it to disk and then you read to disk So you send it to yourself in some sense you send it in time Yeah, but technique is the same error correction codes So the idea is that by scratches or by noise, uh, which is basically the same idea from theoretical point of view You introduce errors and error correction is just try toe To make no errors influencing what you get But let's get a bit to theory part and how this magic happens So let's say like take some toy example toy channel. Let's say we work with Channel with erasures. So basically when you send the message from here to there some abstract channel from point a to b The only type of errors which can happen is uh erasures. So like for example, you send hello world and some characters being erased But since you're a human being and you know english you can't still you still can guess what was the message, right? Because like Because you can guess it most probably I hope Yeah, but why is that so because actually we know that this is a natural human language and natural languages are very redundant So there are much more information there Then you actually need to send this to For the message itself So like like for example, no hello is written with double l if you write it in one l you still understand what's written there So there are a lot of errors you can tolerate as a human being But as a computer what usually you send is just zeros and ones and it's not the natural language So you have like channel So let's assume we are we're a computer. So we don't know english. So we don't understand what's there So we had already erasures. So what would you do if you again our example with real noise in the pub? So if you talk to a person and person didn't really get what he said what you do Yeah, you just repeat. Yeah, so actually this is the very basic and the simplest idea how you Do erasures but in this case like in the theory you don't want to send data back here like so That the person from Amsterdam in our example sends you the back message. Oh, please repeat You what you do you send the message? You repeat message twice already. So you send it from the very beginning message twice or three times or whatever So there are still errors can happen But with highly likely this error will happen in the different positions So when you put like compared two parts of the message and you know, they were originally the same You compare the content letters like h the first letter here is h We know this e l and l it's fine without any error correction l here. It's all here's w So basically comparing the first and second part, you know for sure. What is the message? There is a still slight chance that for example h the first h will be raised in both Citations in the like in the first part in the second part, but the probability of this becomes like for example if the probability to raise h is 10 percent Then probability to raise h in both parts only 1 percent ready. So it like basically squared probability or if the probability was 1 percent then it becomes 1 over 10,000 Yeah, so you compare these two messages and what you got the original message. So this is very like So example, but basically it shows the main idea of all the error correction, which happens So the idea is just you add some additional information which you don't really need Which is just redundant information, but because of that because you have redundant information When you are in Amsterdam, you don't need to send message again You just compare like you apply some algorithms and you because you send more than needed you can tolerate the errors Is it clear to some extent Yeah, so what is the modern challenge because actually this idea is this this was called repetition code It's very bad code actually because you need to send like messages twice longer than it's needed. So For example, if you there is a theorem Yeah, because it's theory. There is a theorem which proven if you have for example 30 percent of erasures in your channel Then you need to add only 30 percent longer messages So like for example, if instead of sending 100 bits you send 130 bits And there is a code. There is a theory which you can tolerate all the errors Uh Yeah, so what is the modern challenge who knows what this this on the picture? Yeah, it's fiber optics on the sea but on the ocean's bed like actually I really like this one You know, it's norway and this is swalbert So I don't know how many like couple of thousand people living there Like it's very cold there and there is a huge line just going out just to them Under the sea. I know like I think it's couple of thousand kilometers. Yeah, but uh Yeah, the idea is that If you and actually here if you like the small Green line is the cable which would get your message sent to omster dump Sorry under the Baltic sea Yeah, but the point is that most of the data now is sent via the fiber optics under the ocean on the ocean bed And the point is the very good about fiber optics. It's very fast. It's very good like for example, like if you google a bit just some random number like Current speed of fiber optics one petabit per second. We just send to the five 15 bits per second Uh, so like I mean like these numbers are so astronomic. Hi, you didn't really grasp. What is this? So let's say 10 to the 15 bits is a great game of thrones all episodes and in one second and in blu-ray 1080p quality And send 300 times So this is 10 to the 15 15 bits and fiber optics can send it to one second So you can now you can kind of better grasp the how big is that? Yeah, so the problem is that you need to As you said like for example, even if you apply a very easy decoding algorithm, which was example of repetition code So for example, you say and not game of thrones 300 times, but 150 times and then you repeat Then just to compare this amount of data. We need a lot of time. So for example, let's say So this is one kilo bit, which is 1024 bits, you know bits zero some ones Uh So how fast we should to the the computer on the receiving side should be able to decode this So let's say it decodes one kilo bit this amount of data in zero point zero zero zero zero one second So one over a million seconds Then uh to decode the suffix will take 12 days And the data comes in one second. So next second you will have three hand more see early not seasons copies of all game of thrones episodes So the the modern challenge is You need to do something to decode extremely fast And for that there is actually very sophisticated algorithms. So for example, one of the Simplest and use one is called load partial codes So the idea is that you have bits, but you not just repeat as we said in our petition code example So you put the bits like in this manner And then you have this structure called tonograph and the idea is that the sum of Incoming edges should be always even so for example for this it should we have two Fine for this we have one zero and this is erasure, but we know that the sum of them should be even So this one plus zero gives one plus something here, which is either zero one So to make it even epsilon should be Yes, we should be one Someone is still following me And the same is for here so In fact the algorithms are very highly mathematical. There were a lot of proofs and a lot of research But I hope you got the at least the main idea So lessons learned from today. You cannot avoid noise in the whatever day they said If you like if you lost me somewhere in the beginning like just get back on the ship and just read what's written here So you cannot avoid avoid noise It just you know physics real world But you can repeat and it's just the basic idea of how we do so you repeat the message And now you should be really fast and that's it. Thank you very much Nice presentation and actually we have three questions now to you the first is what What this picture was from like which movie it is from like this lady I just googled Audrey Hepburn and you know was the first one I know maybe breakfast Tiffany's most probably If you don't know the movie with Audrey Hepburn say Tiffany Second question. What will happen if you scratch the cd from two sides on two sides? Let's try Oh So I squished from two sides Let's see if anything happens Yes your place, I think you need to scratch it quite a lot. Okay, so this stops playing And now the last one and I lost it Yeah, what is fiber optics made of? It's some plastic Plastic nice sensor. Thank you And we have one more question actually On which level tcp is stagnant with your recording apples. It's usually physical there Cool some more questions I Can hear they are made of quartz and silicon Yeah, fiber optics is made of quartz and silicon. Nice. No Cool


Sometimes the things you need to know are buried under things that you don't need. Sometimes the people you need are hidden behind people you don't need and so this skill that you develop of being able to sift and prune and pay back and cut away in yourself and in your organizations to get to the people that you do need the ideas you do need sometimes is very difficult to do and we don't do it enough.