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Updated: May 19, 2025
Around the walls were seated a variegated, almost motley, array of men and women, from the dear old fat mother of Fräulein Therese and the three boys, the daughters-in-law, the granddaughters, to a picturesque old man, whose coal-black beard fell almost to his waist, our friend the "shipmaster," and the band of four musicians, all dressed in the Tyrolese costume, with the exception of the women of the Rhiner family.
And you? How came you to find your way to this inaccessible spot?" "We are going to the Achensee to the Hotel Rhiner, to hear Fräulein Therese " "You have heard of my little friend Therese, and you have come how many thousand miles? to hear her sing and play on her zither?" "To do all that, but mostly to see if she will tell me her love story."
Jimmie came and pounded on our door, executing a small war-dance in the corridor when we appeared, "We've struck our gait," he said, ecstatically, to me. "Virtue is its own reward. This pays us for Baden-Baden and Paris. What do you think? The Rhiner family themselves do the cooking.
We could only see the roof of her cottage in the grove of trees. There is a new hotel somewhere along the lake; but we left that, with its modern equipments and electric lights, and went where we had been directed to the Hotel Rhiner. Fräulein Therese met us at the landing. Alas! she was no longer the beauty of her love story of thirty years before. She was ample.
Some thirty years ago the father Rhiner, now dead and gone, the mother, whose voice is still a wonder, Fräulein Therese, and the three boys journeyed to London to sing before the Queen at her jubilee. This made them famous, and was the beginning of the Fräulein's love story, which was told me in London by Lady J., a relative of the duke who so nearly wrecked the Fräulein's life.
The bed squeaked; the mattress, I think, was filled with corn-shucks, the hard part of which had an ungentle way of assailing you when you least expected it. Yet, if now were given to me the choice of going back to the Élysée Palace in Paris, or the Hotel Rhiner on the Achensee, it would not take me two seconds to start for the corn-shucks.
The Hotel Rhiner is severely plain, almost unfurnished, and its appointments are primitive in the extreme. There was no carpet upon the floor of our rooms. Two little single beds stood side by side. A single candle was supposed to furnish light, and the wash-bowl was about the size of your hand.
A rosy-cheeked, amply proportioned maid, named Rosa, dressed in the picturesque costume of the Tyrolese peasants, installed us in our rooms and advised us to row upon the lake and see the sunset before supper. Tourists from the other hotels were being landed at our pier from tiny boats, to have their supper at the Hotel Rhiner, for the cooking is famous.
Yet everything was exquisitely clean, and from the windows of our corner room stretched away the blue Achensee and the mountains of the Tyrol, making a view which made you forget that the sheets were damp, and that the chairs were uncushioned. Physically, I am sure that I was never more uncomfortable than I was at the Hotel Rhiner.
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