The blessing bringing daughters of the Sun, the sun-beams, kissed his
cheeks, and Vertigo stood and watched, but dared not approach him; and
the swallows below from grandfather's house, where there were no less
than seven nests, flew up to him and the goats, and they sang: "We and
you! and you and we!" They brought greetings from home, even from the
two hens, the only birds in the room; with whom however Rudy never had
intercourse.

Little as he was, he had traveled, and not a little, for so small a
boy; he was born in the Canton Valais, and had been carried from there
over the mountains. Lately he had visited the Staubbach, which waves
in the air like a silver gauze, before the snow decked, dazzling white
mountain: "the Jungfrau." And he had been in Grindelwald, near the
great glaciers; but that was a sad story. There, his mother had found
her death, and, "little Rudy," so said his grandfather, "had lost his
childish merriment." "When the boy was not a year old, he laughed more
than he cried," so wrote his mother, "but since he was in the
ice-gap, quite another mind has come over him." His grand-father did
not like to speak on the subject, but every one on the mountain knew
all about it.

Rudy's father had been a postilion, and the large dog in the room, had
always followed him on his journeys to the lake of Geneva, over the
Simplon. In the valley of the Rhone, in Canton Valais, still lived
Rudy's family, on his father's side, and his father's brother was a
famous chamois hunter and a well-known guide. Rudy was only a year
old, when he lost his father, and his mother longed to return to her
relations in Berner Oberlande. Her father lived a few hours walk from
Grindelwald; he was a carver in wood, and earned enough by it to live.
In the month of June, carrying her little child, she started