For, if, when rolling one inside the door, it broke loose and went trundling down the valley, it might destroy a village and people might think it an avalanche.
In those days, there were no mists, or storms, or barren rocks, or danger of landslides. On the day for churning out the butter from the cream, they used to employ the giants and give them big dinners for their wages, for the churns were like towers, for height.
This was the story of the Golden Age, as told by the old folks, who sat on their stone seats in front of the quaint wooden houses. As told, year after year, everything grew in size, just as an avalanche starts as a snowball and is finally able to wipe out a whole village, including modern hotels, as is done occasionally in our day. [[170]]
But what happens always, when people get too rich or prosperous, followed in this case also. It went to their heads. Then they become proud, lazy and often cruel. Gold got to be as common, as iron or lead had been, yet many old frumps and codgers wanted more. Then misers became numerous. Such fruit grew out of the root of all evil. It seemed as if there was nothing more deceitful, than those very riches which their ancestors knew nothing about. In such prosperity, the farmers and shepherds had foolishly thought, lay the secret of all joy. They had imagined that, if they could only get and increase what they could sell for money, it would make them, as they used to say, “perfectly happy.”
The climate changed and gradually the whole land grew colder. Snow covered the mountain tops. Rocks, storms, fog, mist, and clouds lay long over the land. Land slides occurred often, and avalanches ruined the meadows and villages. Huge rivers of ice, called glaciers, leagues long, and hundreds of yards deep, were formed. These covered up the flowers. Summers grew shorter and winters grew longer. Grapes and fruit shriveled up to their present size and cows and goats were no longer such givers of food as of old. Milkmaids, who had to work with a cow thrice a day to get two small pails of milk between daybreak and [[171]]dark, wondered at the story of the Golden Age, which the old folks constantly told. They wished they had lived then, when a boat, instead of a bucket, was the sign of a dairy man’s shop.
Many looked wistfully up at the ruins of an old tower, now ivy grown, where the owls hooted at night. They wondered, when told that, in the Golden Age, this was the Giant’s Churn, in which boat loads of cream were turned into butter by the good natured monster, who ladled out the yellow delicacy, with a shovel, as big as a pine tree.
In the Golden Age, the fairies were very numerous, of many kinds and always busy.
Some were rough, and loved to play tricks on stingy farmers, bad tempered milk maids, rude boys and naughty girls; but most of them were always glad to do something nice and pleasant, and, especially, to help kind people in their work.
But when the age of steam and smoke and puffing locomotives, and boats, with iron chimneys, that breathed out choking gas from their furnaces, and left clouds of blackness on the beautiful blue lakes and landscape, had come, the happy days changed to gloom. Men made railroads up to the very tops of the mountains and stuck their big hotels in the prettiest places, even on the high Alps. They spoiled the village [[172]]dances, drove away the poor people from their old amusements in summer, and even turned thousands of the once honest Swiss folks into money-grubbers. Then the fairies lost all patience, and determined to call an out door congress, such as the mortals do at the Landsgemeinde, or town meetings, when they talked politics and voted by thousands, raising their hands, to mean “yes” or “no.”
One fairy, that was the lawyer and politician of the Swiss fairy world, was especially angry, when it was learned that even the children were taught by their parents to tell lies about their mother being dead—when she was waiting in the chalet, for the money the little girls got by telling doleful tales and thus moving the pity of travelers.