CHAPTER I.
The Heif Goats lived close to the Heifen Glacier, one of the largest in Switzerland. In fact, their Châlet, or the cavern which they christened by that name, overhung the steepest precipice, and was inaccessible to anyone except its proprietors.
"It is such a comfort to be secluded in these disturbed times," the Goat-mother often remarked to her husband. "If I lived near a high road I should never know a moment's happiness. The children are so giddy, they would be gambolling about round the very wheels of the char-à-bancs, turning head over heels for halfpence, before I could cry Goats-i-tivy!"
The whole glacier valley swarmed with the kin of the Goat family. There were the bond-slaves who worked for the peasants, and the free Goats who possessed their own caves, cultivated their ground industriously, and lived greatly on the sandwich papers left by tourists in the summer-time.
"Such a treat, especially the light yellow sort with printing, that always has crumbs in it," said the Goat-mother. "It makes a delicious meal. We generally have it on fête days."
The family of the Heif Goats consisted of the Heif-father, his wife, and their four children, Heinrich, Lizbet, Pyto, and Lénora.
The young Goats had been brought up with some severity by their parents, who had old-fashioned notions with regard to discipline; and three things had been especially enjoined upon them from their infancy. Always to speak the truth, never to mess their clean pinafores, and last, but not least, never to play with the Chamois!
"They are too wild and frivolous," the Goat-mother used to say, with a nod of her frilled cap. "Such very long springs are in exceedingly bad taste. The Chamois have no repose of manner."
Under this system the children grew up very well-behaved. The daughters worked in the house, the sons helped their father; and in the evening they all descended to the Glacier to collect any remnants of food left by the endless stream of visitors, who all through the summer toiled up to the Eismeer, and down again to the Inn on the other side of the valley.
These travellers were a perpetual source of interest and amusement to the Goat family.
They could never quite make out what they were doing, but the Heif-mother finally decided that their journeys must be some religious or national observance.
"People would never struggle about on the ice like that—tied to each other with ropes, too!—unless it was a painful duty," she said. "I consider it very praiseworthy."
Sometimes the young Goats in their invisible eyrie, would go off into shouts of merriment as a group of excursionists crawled slowly into sight; the ladies in their short skirts and large flapping hats, alpenstock in hand, clinging desperately to the guides as they ascended every slippery ice-peak.
But on these occasions the Goat-mother always reproved them.
"Remember," she would say severely, "that because people are ridiculous you shouldn't be unmannerly. They can't help their appearance, poor things! They may think themselves quite as good as we are."
"Well, at all events, we don't look like that," said Lizbet. "I am sure you would never allow it."
The principal news from the outer world was brought to the Heif family by a Stein-bok pedlar, who wandered about the country with his wares, and was so popular that he was a friend of all classes, and supplied even the Chamois with their groceries and tobacco.
He generally arrived at the Châlet on the first of every month, and spread out his wares on the grass plot in front of the cave, while the Goat-mother and her children walked up and down, and bargained good-humouredly for anything they had taken a fancy to.