This gentleman said that among the poorer peasants in the Valais,
it was common for the brothers in a family to cast lots
to determine which of them should have the coveted privilege
of marrying, and his brethren - doomed bachelors - heroically
banded themselves together to help support the new family.
We left Zermatt in a wagon - and in a rain-storm, too
- for St. Nicholas about ten o'clock one morning.
Again we passed between those grass-clad prodigious cliffs,
specked with wee dwellings peeping over at us from
velvety green walls ten and twelve hundred feet high.
It did not seem possible that the imaginary chamois
even could climb those precipices. Lovers on opposite
cliffs probably kiss through a spy-glass, and correspond
with a rifle.
In Switzerland the farmer's plow is a wide shovel,
which scrapes up and turns over the thin earthy skin of his
native rock - and there the man of the plow is a hero.
Now here, by our St. Nicholas road, was a grave, and it
had a tragic story. A plowman was skinning his farm
one morning - not the steepest part of it, but still
a steep part - that is, he was not skinning the front
of his farm, but the roof of it, near the eaves - when he
absent-mindedly let go of the plow-handles to moisten
his hands, in the usual way; he lost his balance and fell
out of his farm backward; poor fellow, he never touched
anything till he struck bottom, fifteen hundred feet below.
[1] We throw a halo of heroism around the life of the
soldier and the sailor, because of the deadly dangers they
are facing all the time. But we are not used to looking
upon farming as a heroic occupation. This is because we
have not lived in Switzerland.
1. This was on a Sunday. - M.T.
From St. Nicholas we struck out for Visp - or Vispach - on foot.
The rain-storms had been at work during several days,
and had done a deal of damage in Switzerland and Savoy.
We came to one place where a stream had changed its
course and plunged down a mountain in a new place,
sweeping everything before it. Two poor but precious farms
by the roadside were ruined. One was washed clear away,
and the bed-rock exposed; the other was buried out of sight
under a tumbled chaos of rocks, gravel, mud, and rubbish.
The resistless might of water was well exemplified.
Some saplings which had stood in the way were bent to the ground,
stripped clean of their bark, and buried under rocky debris.
The road had been swept away, too.
In another place, where the road was high up on the mountain's
face, and its outside edge protected by flimsy masonry,
we frequently came across spots where this masonry had
carved off and left dangerous gaps for mules to get over;
and with still more frequency we found the masonry
slightly crumbled, and marked by mule-hoofs, thus showing
that there had been danger of an accident to somebody.
When at last we came to a badly ruptured bit of masonry,
with hoof-prints evidencing a desperate struggle
to regain the lost foothold, I looked quite hopefully
over the dizzy precipice. But there was nobody down there.
They take exceedingly good care of their rivers in Switzerland
and other portions of Europe. They wall up both banks
with slanting solid stone masonry - so that from end
to end of these rivers the banks look like the wharves
at St. Louis and other towns on the Mississippi River.
It was during this walk from St. Nicholas, in the shadow
of the majestic Alps, that we came across some little
children amusing themselves in what seemed, at first,
a most odd and original way - but it wasn't; it was in
simply a natural and characteristic way. They were roped
together with a string, they had mimic alpenstocks and
ice-axes, and were climbing a meek and lowly manure-pile
with a most blood-curdling amount of care and caution.
The "guide" at the head of the line cut imaginary steps,
in a laborious and painstaking way, and not a monkey
budged till the step above was vacated. If we had waited
we should have witnessed an imaginary accident, no doubt;
and we should have heard the intrepid band hurrah when they
made the summit and looked around upon the "magnificent view,"
and seen them throw themselves down in exhausted attitudes
for a rest in that commanding situation.
In Nevada I used to see the children play at silver-mining.
Of course, the great thing was an accident in a mine,
and there were two "star" parts; that of the man
who fell down the mimic shaft, and that of the daring
hero who was lowered into the depths to bring him up.
I knew one small chap who always insisted on playing
BOTH of these parts - and he carried his point.
He would tumble into the shaft and die, and then come
to the surface and go back after his own remains.
It is the smartest boy that gets the hero part everywhere;
he is head guide in Switzerland, head miner in Nevada,
head bull-fighter in Spain, etc.; but I knew a preacher's son,
seven years old, who once selected a part for himself compared
to which those just mentioned are tame and unimpressive.
Jimmy's father stopped him from driving imaginary
horse-cars one Sunday - stopped him from playing captain
of an imaginary steamboat next Sunday - stopped him
from leading an imaginary army to battle the following
Sunday - and so on. Finally the little fellow said:
"I've tried everything, and they won't any of them do.
What CAN I play?"
"I hardly know, Jimmy; but you MUST play only things
that are suitable to the Sabbath-day."
Next Sunday the preacher stepped softly to a back-room
door to see if the children were rightly employed.
He peeped in.
