“Now,” fancied the Frost Giants, that were watching from aloft, “it surely will uphold the reputation of the family and act like other avalanches, in turning villages into cemeteries, and [[166]]farms and vineyards into deserts.” Vain thought!
This lively chit of an avalanche followed the road, far enough to tumble, flat into the ditch, some drunken fellows, who had just come out of the gin house, and were staggering homewards. It was like ironing out clothes, to see the way that avalanche flattened out those topers. It left them for hours on the roadside, faces downwards, and sleeping off their debauch. When they woke up, as out of a cold bath, they shook off the snow and trudged homeward, only to get, from their sharp-tongued wives, the scoldings they richly deserved.
Many another adventure did that judicial avalanche have, before it had scudded past other villages, but hurting next to nothing, avoiding forests, farmhouses and vineyards, until it reached a glacier, over which it rolled.
Scratching, cracking, dropping out dirty stuff, rock and gravel, it acted like a dredge box. It sprinkled out its contents, to fill up the great deep green crevasses in the ice, until it finally reached a big open space of waste land, that had nothing on it, but rocks and bushes. Then, with a roar, as if laughing at itself, it broke up, spread open, and left the place strewn with more rocks and stones and lumps of ice.
Then a troop of fairies came riding on the hot, [[167]]dry, south wind. They blew, with their breath, on the snow mass, and quickly melted it into the river, so fast, indeed, that men wondered at the high water in the distant lakes and the rivers in France. In lovely Switzerland, new soil was made, where today are farms and vineyards. In time, billions of purple clusters are plucked, and willing tourists are happy, in taking the grape cure; while they walk over the place where once, a judicially minded avalanche had laughed so hard, that it burst. [[168]]
XVI
THE FAIRIES AND THEIR PLAYGROUND
Once upon a time in Switzerland, there was a Golden Age for cows and people. This was before the country had become the playground of Europe and the Land of a Thousand Hotels. It was before men climbed mountains for pleasure; or, imitating the New Hampshire Yankees on Mount Washington, had built railways to their summits, and filled the land with wires and rails. Not then, could the Edelweiss be bought in a drygoods store, or in the markets. Not then did lazy and soft-muscled tourists pay money to have burnt upon alpenstocks the names of a hundred mountains, which they never even saw, except from a hotel porch, or distant window, or from the train.
Then, as the old ladies tell us, summer lasted during ten months of the year and the very mild winter only eight weeks. Flowers were everywhere and the bees were so busy that immense caverns were stored with the honey combs, which hives could not hold. Colossal stalactites, [[169]]and mosses, big as cabbages, were common. Then the land was so rich in clover and grass, that grew up to the very tops of the highest mountains, that the cows had to be milked three times a day. They were so large and fat, that the milk was poured by the bucket full into tanks, so big that the milk men went round in boats to skim off the cream for the making of cheese. These balls and disks were so thick and so big around, that the dairy men had to be very careful in piling them up in the store houses.