he did not like strangers, and Rudy was as yet a stranger; he did not,
however, long remain so, he soon endeared himself to every heart, and
became like one of the family.
“We are not very badly off, here in the canton Valais,” said his uncle one
day; “we have the chamois, they do not die so fast as the wild goats, and it
is certainly much better here now than in former times. How highly the old
times have been spoken of, but ours is better. The bag has been opened, and
a current of air now blows through our once confined valley. Something
better always makes its appearance when old, worn-out things fail.”
When his uncle became communicative, he would relate stories of his
youthful days, and farther back still of the warlike times in which his father
had lived. Valais was then, as he expressed it, only a closed-up bag, quite
full of sick people, miserable cretins; but the French soldiers came, and they
were capital doctors, they soon killed the disease and the sick people, too.
The French people knew how to fight in more ways than one, and the girls
knew how to conquer too; and when he said this the uncle nodded at his
wife, who was a French woman by birth, and laughed. The French could
also do battle on the stones. “It was they who cut a road out of the solid
rock over the Simplon-such a road, that I need only say to a child of three
years old, ‘Go down to Italy, you have only to keep in the high road,’ and
the child will soon arrive in Italy, if he followed my directions.”
Then the uncle sang a French song, and cried, “Hurrah! long live
Napoleon Buonaparte.” This was the first time Rudy had ever heard of
France, or of Lyons, that great city on the Rhone where his uncle had once
lived. His uncle said that Rudy, in a very few years, would become a clever
hunter, he had quite a talent for it; he taught the boy to hold a gun properly,
and to load and fire it. In the hunting season he took him to the hills, and
made him drink the warm blood of the chamois, which is said to prevent the
hunter from becoming giddy; he taught him to know the time when, from
the different mountains, the avalanche is likely to fall, namely, at noontide
or in the evening, from the effects of the sun’s rays; he made him observe
the movements of the chamois when he gave a leap, so that he might fall
