He accommodated tourists on the side, in more ways than one, since his land was all up and down, and from a distance his quaint little place must have looked as if it were fixed like a postage stamp against the rising wall of the mountain. What kept it there I cannot for the life of me tell you. I always felt safer in back of it for then, if the worst happened, I should fall down against it and stop. There was a little odd patch of level land here, too, and he utilized it for an arbor where I used to sit.
Here Herr Twann would often join me and I would banter him about the insignificant size of his country. “Ach,” he would say, “dat iss becauss it iss all crunched up—what? Like a piece of trash paper. Spread it out flat and it iss bigger dan your United States.” There was some force to this argument.
Herr Twann and his little household talked German among themselves, like most of the inhabitants of northern Switzerland, though they all spoke a sort of English which they had picked up from the many tourists who resorted to the funny little place before the war.
His two children, Egbert and Emmie, were my particular friends and many were the Alpine rambles that we had together. They were about ten and eleven respectively, I think, the girl being the younger. Often we would go down into St. Craix, the oddest little community you would wish to see, with its little spired chapel just like a church in a toy village.
It was upon the Sunday of my first attendance at this church that something happened which greatly distressed me. It all grew out of the mischievous banter of those children. When the service was over they showed me the relics (of the sort that any church in Switzerland has), hallowed mementoes of saints and martyrs, and I hope I showed a seemly reverence for them. As we left the hamlet they led me to a window of the little schoolhouse and showed me within a skull which they said had been found in a glacier.
“Now,” said I, “if you will show me the apple that William Tell shot from his son’s head, I shall have seen all the sights.”
“We will show you the gray meteor,” they said. “You know what dat meteor iss?”
“A big rock,” I told them, and I added sagely that we were not so stupid in America.
They laughed and said I should see what kind of a rock this “gray meteor” was.
After we had walked some distance they began looking eagerly across a certain field at the farther side of which a mountain arose. Right at the base of this mountain was a kind of grove. Their laughing voices echoed back from the rugged height as we entered the field, and sounded clear and musical in the quiet calm of that Alpine Sabbath morn.