Chapter 16: 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, 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.

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.

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 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.