But in this sin-cursed world
“The sea of fortune doth not ever flow;
She draws her favors to the lowest ebb;
Her tides have equal times to come and go;
Her loom doth weave the fine and coarsest web.”
This same Alpenglühen casts its kaleidoscopic rays directly at the foot of the Oberland on eyes that are incapable of appreciating the wealth of beauty that is around and above them. Here are a most sadly afflicted people; here prevail, to a remarkable degree, goitre and cretinism. We find in Juvenal, “Quis tumidum guttur miratur in Alpibus?” (“Who wonders at goitres in the Alps?”) Congenital cases are not infrequent, but, in a majority of instances, it makes its appearance on a child at about the age of twelve or fourteen. The size these goitrous growths may attain is extraordinary, hanging down on the breast, enormous and unsightly things, recalling the description in “The Tempest,”—
“When we were boys,
Who would have believed that there were mountaineers
Dew-lapp’d like bulls, whose throats had hanging at ’em
Hideous wallets of flesh.”