"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.