Next, “You never see any flower-boxes in the windows, here—­never anything but now and then a cat—­a torpid one; but you take a Protestant canton:  windows perfectly lovely with flowers—­and as for cats, there’s just acres of them.  These folks in this canton leave a road to make itself, and then fine you three francs if you ‘trot’ over it —­as if a horse could trot over such a sarcasm of a road.”  Next about the goiter:  “They talk about goiter!—­I haven’t seen a goiter in this whole canton that I couldn’t put in a hat.”

He had growled at everything, but I judged it would puzzle him to find anything the matter with this majestic glacier.  I intimated as much; but he was ready, and said with surly discontent:  “You ought to see them in the Protestant cantons.”

This irritated me.  But I concealed the feeling, and asked: 

“What is the matter with this one?”

“Matter?  Why, it ain’t in any kind of condition.  They never take any care of a glacier here.  The moraine has been spilling gravel around it, and got it all dirty.”

“Why, man, they can’t help that.”

“They?  You’re right.  That is, they won’t.  They could if they wanted to.  You never see a speck of dirt on a Protestant glacier.  Look at the Rhone glacier.  It is fifteen miles long, and seven hundred feet think.  If this was a Protestant glacier you wouldn’t see it looking like this, I can tell you.”

“That is nonsense.  What would they do with it?”

“They would whitewash it.  They always do.”

I did not believe a word of this, but rather than have trouble I let it go; for it is a waste of breath to argue with a bigot.  I even doubted if the Rhone glacier was in a Protestant canton; but I did not know, so I could not make anything by contradicting a man who would probably put me down at once with manufactured evidence.

About nine miles from St. Nicholas we crossed a bridge over the raging torrent of the Visp, and came to a log strip of flimsy fencing which was pretending to secure people from tumbling over a perpendicular wall forty feet high and into the river.  Three children were approaching; one of them, a little girl, about eight years old, was running; when pretty close to us she stumbled and fell, and her feet shot under the rail of the fence and for a moment projected over the stream.  It gave us a sharp shock, for we thought she was gone, sure, for the ground slanted steeply, and to save herself seemed a sheer impossibility; but she managed to scramble up, and ran by us laughing.

We went forward and examined the place and saw the long tracks which her feet had made in the dirt when they darted over the verge.  If she had finished her trip she would have struck some big rocks in the edge of the water, and then the torrent would have snatched her downstream among the half-covered boulders and she would have been pounded to pulp in two minutes.  We had come exceedingly near witnessing her death.