[309] Mr. Wyss heard this and the following tale in Haslithal and Gadmen.
[310] In several of the high valleys of Switzerland it is only a single cherry-tree which happens to be favourably situated that bears fruit. It bears abundantly, and the fruit ripens about the month of August. Wyss.
[311] Compare the narrative in the Swiss dialect given by Grimm, Deut. Mythol. p. 419. The same peasant of Belp who related the first legend was Mr. Wyss's authority for this one. "The vanishing of the Bergmänlein," says Mr. Wyss, "appears to be a matter of importance to the popular faith. It is almost always ascribed to the fault of mankind—sometimes to their wickedness."
We may in these tales recognise the box of Pandora under a different form, but the ground is the same. Curiosity and wickedness are still the cause of superior beings withdrawing their favour from man.
"I have never any where else," says Mr. Wyss, "heard of the goose-feet; but that all is not right with their feet is evident from the popular tradition giving long trailing mantles as the dress of the little people. Some will have it that their feet are regularly formed, but set on their legs the wrong way, so that the toes are behind and the heels before."
Heywood, in his Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, p. 554, relates a story which would seem to refer to a similar belief.
[312] Müller, Bilder und Sagen, p. 119; see above, p. [81]. Coals are the usual form under which the Dwarfs conceal the precious metals. We also find this trait in Scandinavia. A smith who lived near Aarhuus in Jutland, as he was going to church, saw a Troll on the roadside very busy about two straws that had got across each other on a heap of coals, and which, do what he would, he could not remove from their position. He asked the smith to do it for him; but he who knew better things took up the coals with the cross straws on them, and carried them home in spite of the screams of the Troll, and when he reached his own house he found it was a large treasure he had got, over which the Troll had lost all power. Thiele, i. 122.
[313] Müller, ut sup. p. 123.
[314] Müller, ut sup. p. 126.
[315] This story is told of two places in the Highlands of Berning, of Ralligen, a little village on the lake of Thun, where there once stood a town called Roll; and again, of Schillingsdorf, a place in the valley of Grinderwald, formerly destroyed by a mountain slip.