The way that judicial avalanche behaved, was a scandal among the Frost Giants. The old style had been to toss donkeys, and their drivers, down within glacier crevices, into cold storage, a thousand feet deep; to crush houses, kill cattle, and bury more people in one day than the undertakers could put into coffins in a month. Besides this, old fashioned avalanches used to lay waste orchards, and fruitful fields, and spoil vineyards.
The conduct of this avalanche, which seemed bent on settling quarrels, was more like that of a nun, a monk, a parson, or an old grandmother. It happened to be about the time that the great Napoleon was upsetting the world like a political avalanche, and the Empress Josephine was covering up the red arms of peasant girls, now wives of generals, with long white kid gloves reaching up to the arm pits.
Now, in a certain house in the dorf, an old fashioned mother was scolding her frivolous young daughter, named Angelette, for aping Paris and Napoleonic fashions. She remarked that things had come to a pretty pass, when a young snip of a girl needed the leather of a whole goat to clothe her arms. Daddy had also joined in the conversation, but only to lose his temper. In his gestures, the cover of his pipe dropped [[163]]off, spilling the hot ashes all over his daughter’s low-necked frock. The sparks made her jump, besides reddening the skin of her neck, even more than her arms.
The girl Angelette was dressing for the evening dance, on the green, and was quite put out by the accident. In fact, the old man had seized the tip of Angelette’s middle finger of her glove and had pulled off the half yard or more of white kid, when the avalanche flew past. It flung a bit of rock, like the bolt of a catapult, right through the window, sending the glove, all muddy and torn, out of the other.
Thinking his last day had come, the old daddy fell on his knees to pray, but he was quickly awakened to his senses, by hearing a regular concert in the barn yard. Outside, the donkeys were braying, the horses neighing, the roosters crowing, the geese cackling, the hens clucking, and the dogs barking—and all in joy. As for the old billy goat, he stood up on his hind legs and cut up such capers, that the whole family of kids began to imitate him by frisking in a circle.
Where, a minute or two before, had been ominous stillness, there had come, in the twinkling of an eye, a salvo of rejoicing in the animal world. It was as if the boarders in Noah’s ark had been let loose and were having a concert. It’s a way the animals have, of showing their [[164]]joy, with a kind of music, all their own, which they can make, when the danger they feared is over and deliverance has come.
There was also a bride, the daughter of the richest man in the dorf, who was dressing for her wedding. All the other girls of her set were collecting their old shoes and handfuls of rice, ready to fling after the young couple’s carriage for good luck.
The bride’s kid boots, ordered from Paris, had cost fourteen dollars. The mail wagon having arrived, with the letters and the salt, at the Post Office, had just stopped in front of the bride’s house and handed out the long waited package. The servant maid was bringing the lovely white buttoned shoes upstairs, when, along and downward, thundered the avalanche. According to a way that avalanches have, this one flung off, at the sides, stones, rocks, gravel, ice and mud. Now, like cannon balls in a bombardment, one mass of wet snow, not quite so big as a fat elephant, struck the maid. It knocked her heels over head, sent her slippers flying, and her feet in the air, until one could see the color of her stockings, from toe to knees. As for the box from Paris, it was shot, as out of a gun, into the pig pen. The bride screamed, but nobody was hurt, and the maid quickly smoothed out her [[165]]hair and dress, put on her slippers, and she was soon presentable.
It was weeks after the honeymoon, and return of the couple, that, after searching up hill and down dale, the remains of what were once a pair of white kid boots from Paris, were found in the black mire, among the pigs. Not knowing what it was, the porkers had crushed it under their hoofs. After trial with their teeth, unable to eat it, or its not tasting nice, the pigs thought it was not worth a turnip. One piggy, without chewing, had actually attempted to swallow it. Not finding it suited to a hog’s diet, the animal had dropped it with a grunt, and trampled on it. When fished out with the long handled pitchfork, it was recognized as a Paris shoe, by the two white buttons, which had escaped the blackening of the mire.
By this time the proceedings of this avalanche, which had started out to settle quarrels, had become positively frivolous. Wabbling about, here and there, reeling like a man with a quart of brandy in his stomach, the mighty ball rolled down the long road, leading into a larger village.