When, in 1778, the Hessians and red coats could not capture Lafayette, with his Continental soldiers, they stole the bread out of the oven and drank up the milk from the spring house.
The little girls, Sarah, Hannah and Margaret, often heard from their grandfather and grandmother about Switzerland, whence, following William Penn, they had come. Their kinsfolk still lived in the old land across the sea. When the Revolutionary war was over, their father, John Harby, came to the Quaker City, and kept a hotel. There, when Philadelphia was the national capital, he entertained members of Congress and the refugee French noblemen.
When the story teller heard the once little maids talk about things Swiss, and Hessian, and British, and Pennsylvanian, these three, two of whom the Hessians had once scared into the garret, were dear old ladies. Sitting up in bed, or in her chair, as straight as her rheumatism and her bent fingers would allow, grandmother told us many a tale of Swiss ancestral and Revolutionary times.
To the end of the years of her life, which lasted from 1770 to 1866, her sister Hannah, our maiden aunt, sang the songs, played on the piano [[3]]the ditties, and danced the minuets and waltzes, which the French officers and noblemen had taught her when the Quaker city, from 1790 to 1800, was the national capital.
We children, even when big girls and boys, and ready for college, enjoyed the fun, the music, and the stories. It was from these dear old ladies that the story teller learned to love the mountains, and to climb them, in America and Japan, and, for weeks at a time, to tramp among them in glorious Switzerland.
The ancestral Swiss home was in a valley of the Bernese Oberland, under the shadow of a high mountain. In winter, which usually lasted seven months or more, the people, the boys, and the girls, the cows, goats, donkeys, horses, chickens, and all living things were shut in by heavy snows. Quite often in winter, daddy and the boys had to climb out the windows onto the snows that were piled, or drifted, many feet high against the door. Even on May day, spoiling fun outdoors, there might come a storm which left six or eight feet of snow.
Yet when the sun got up early in the morning, and the south wind blew with a quiet force that did more in a day’s work than a million steam shovels, the snow melted, and soon the green meadows were spangled with red and blue, yellow and white flowers. [[4]]
When June came, the big boys got ready, with their fathers and hired men, to leave their village home, and go up to spend the whole summer on the spicy pastures, that is, the Alps, high up on the mountains, to stay until near October. There the bees would gather honey from the nectar in the blossoms, and cows would feed on the sweet juices of the grass. It was at this season that the milk, cream, butter and cheese, were the very best of the year. Many a growing boy, counting on his fingers the days, looked forward for months to life outdoors, on the highlands, among the birds, the butterflies and the wild animals. As for the cattle, they could sniff the sweet aroma of the flowery fields and grasses at a distance and long before men could.
The day of the great cow parade, when the other four-footed animals, dogs, goats, pigs, horses and donkeys, joining in, was the greatest of the year. Then the leading cow, named Lady, or Queenie, or Cleopatra, often carrying the milking stool on her head, between her horns, led the procession. The girls were all out in their best clothes to deck the hats of the daddies with wreaths and blossoms, and to say and wave good-byes. Pretty nearly every one was decorated with flowers.
Then the music and the yodel songs, and the blowing of the pine wood horns began. These [[5]]awoke the echoes of the distant mountains. Then the sounds, returning, seemed as sweet as the singing by a choir of the heavenly host. No Swiss boy or girl, even when grown up, living in the cities, or in a foreign land, ever forgot the yodel songs, or the hymns his mother used to sing.