Presently we passed the place where a man of better odor was born.  This was the children’s friend, Santa Claus, or St. Nicholas.  There are some unaccountable reputations in the world.  This saint’s is an instance.  He has ranked for ages as the peculiar friend of children, yet it appears he was not much of a friend to his own.  He had ten of them, and when fifty years old he left them, and sought out as dismal a refuge from the world as possible, and became a hermit in order that he might reflect upon pious themes without being disturbed by the joyous and other noises from the nursery, doubtless.

Judging by Pilate and St. Nicholas, there exists no rule for the construction of hermits; they seem made out of all kinds of material.  But Pilate attended to the matter of expiating his sin while he was alive, whereas St. Nicholas will probably have to go on climbing down sooty chimneys, Christmas eve, forever, and conferring kindness on other people’s children, to make up for deserting his own.  His bones are kept in a church in a village (Sachseln) which we visited, and are naturally held in great reverence.  His portrait is common in the farmhouses of the region, but is believed by many to be but an indifferent likeness.  During his hermit life, according to legend, he partook of the bread and wine of the communion once a month, but all the rest of the month he fasted.

A constant marvel with us, as we sped along the bases of the steep mountains on this journey, was, not that avalanches occur, but that they are not occurring all the time.  One does not understand why rocks and landslides do not plunge down these declivities daily.  A landslip occurred three quarters of a century ago, on the route from Arth to Brunnen, which was a formidable thing.  A mass of conglomerate two miles long, a thousand feet broad, and a hundred feet thick, broke away from a cliff three thousand feet high and hurled itself into the valley below, burying four villages and five hundred people, as in a grave.

We had such a beautiful day, and such endless pictures of limpid lakes, and green hills and valleys, and majestic mountains, and milky cataracts dancing down the steeps and gleaming in the sun, that we could not help feeling sweet toward all the world; so we tried to drink all the milk, and eat all the grapes and apricots and berries, and buy all the bouquets of wild flowers which the little peasant boys and girls offered for sale; but we had to retire from this contract, for it was too heavy.

At short distances—­and they were entirely too short—­all along the road, were groups of neat and comely children, with their wares nicely and temptingly set forth in the grass under the shade trees, and as soon as we approached they swarmed into the road, holding out their baskets and milk bottles, and ran beside the carriage, barefoot and bareheaded, and importuned us to buy.  They seldom desisted early, but continued to run and insist—­beside