Soap-Bubble Stories Part 16

"If only you had belonged to a King," sighed the Chip, "I might have had someone of my own cla.s.s to talk to."

"I don't wish to belong to a King," said the Mole. "There's nothing I should dislike more. I am for a Liberal Government, and no farming."

"What vulgarity!" cried the Chip.

"It's a blessing it's dark, and he can't see the children laughing,"

thought the Mole-mother, "or I don't know what would happen."

"Everything that belonged to a King should be treated with Royal respect," continued the Chip.

"As to that, I really haven't time for it," replied the Mole; "what with putting the children to bed, and getting them up again, and all my work in the pa.s.sages, I can't devote myself to Court life."

"If you like, you can represent the people," said the Chip. "_I_ don't mind, only then I can't talk to you."

"You can read out Royal Decrees, and make laws," said the Mole; and to herself she added, "It won't disturb me. I shan't take any notice of them."

"Who's to be n.o.bles?" said the Chip, crossly. "I'd rather not do the thing at all, if it can't be done properly!"

"Well, I can't be people and n.o.bles too, that's quite certain,"

remarked the Mole-mother, as she tidied up her house. "Besides, the children are too young--they wouldn't understand."

"What's it like up above?" enquired the Chip languidly after a short pause, for it was almost better to speak to the Mole, than to n.o.body.

"People still walk on two legs?"

"Why, of course," answered the Mole, "there's never any difference in people, that _I_ can see. They're always exactly alike, except in tempers."

The Chip was sitting upon a little stone-heap against one of the pillars. He fondly imagined it was a Throne; and the Mole-mother, with the utmost good nature, had never undeceived him.

As the last words were spoken, a lump of earth fell from the roof, flattening out the stone-heap, and the Chip only escaped destruction by rolling on one side, where he lay shaking with fright and calling to the Mole-mother to help him. But the Mole had retired with her family to a place of safety. She knew what was happening. The tomb was being opened by a party of antiquarians, and in a few more minutes the blue sky shone into the darkness, and the three-cornered piece of pottery was lying wrapped in paper in the pocket of one of the explorers.

When the Chip recovered himself, he found he was reclining on the velvet floor of a large gla.s.s case full of Etruscan vases. Here was the society he had been pining for all his life!

"What are Moles compared to this?" he said to himself, and quivered with joy at the thought of the pleasures before him.

"How did that broken thing come into our Division?" enquired a Red Dish with two handles.

"I can't imagine! The Director put him in just now," replied a Black Jug. "It's not what we're accustomed to. Everything in here is perfect."

The Chip lay for a moment, dumb with horror and astonishment.

"I belonged to a King," he gasped at last. "You can look at the name written on me."

"You may have names written all over you, for all I care," said the Dish. "You're a Chip, and no King can make you anything else"--and she turned away haughtily.

"And to think that for all those years the Mole-mother was never once rude to me!" thought the Chip. "She was a person of _real_ refinement.

Whatever shall I do if I have to be shut up with these ill-bred people?" he groaned miserably.

"How the woodwork does creak!" said the Director as he came up to the gla.s.s case, with a young lady to whom he was showing the treasures of the Museum.

"That's the most recent discovery," he continued smiling and pointing to the three-cornered piece of pottery--"All I found in my last digging."

"It has a beautiful head on it," said the young lady, "I should be quite satisfied if I could ever find anything so pretty."

"Will you have it?" said the Director of the Museum, who after all was only a young man; looking at the young lady earnestly.

She took the despised Chip in her little hand.

"Thank you very much. It will be a great treasure," she said--and looking up at her face, the three-cornered piece of pottery knew that a happy life was in store for him.

"In spite of the rudeness of my own people, I am in the Museum after all," remarked the Chip, as some months afterwards he hung on a bracket on the wall of the young lady's sitting room. "In what a superior position, too! _They_ only belong to the Director, but _I_ belong to the Director's wife!"

THE GOATS ON THE GLACIER.

CHAPTER I.

The Heif Goats lived close to the Heifen Glacier, one of the largest in Switzerland. In fact, their Chalet, or the cavern which they christened by that name, overhung the steepest precipice, and was inaccessible to anyone except its proprietors.

"It is such a comfort to be secluded in these disturbed times," the Goat-mother often remarked to her husband. "If I lived near a high road I should never know a _moment's_ happiness. The children are so giddy, they would be gambolling about round the very wheels of the char-a-bancs, turning head over heels for halfpence, before I could cry Goats-i-tivy!"

The whole glacier valley swarmed with the kin of the Goat family.

There were the bond-slaves who worked for the peasants, and the free Goats who possessed their own caves, cultivated their ground industriously, and lived greatly on the sandwich papers left by tourists in the summer-time.

"Such a treat, especially the light yellow sort with printing, that always has crumbs in it," said the Goat-mother. "It makes a delicious meal. We generally have it on fete days."

The family of the Heif Goats consisted of the Heif-father, his wife, and their four children, Heinrich, Lizbet, Pyto, and Lenora.

The young Goats had been brought up with some severity by their parents, who had old-fashioned notions with regard to discipline; and three things had been especially enjoined upon them from their infancy. Always to speak the truth, never to mess their clean pinafores, and last, but not least, _never_ to play with the Chamois!

"They are too wild and frivolous," the Goat-mother used to say, with a nod of her frilled cap. "Such very long springs are in exceedingly bad taste. The Chamois have _no_ repose of manner."

Under this system the children grew up very well-behaved. The daughters worked in the house, the sons helped their father; and in the evening they all descended to the Glacier to collect any remnants of food left by the endless stream of visitors, who all through the summer toiled up to the Eismeer, and down again to the Inn on the other side of the valley.

These travellers were a perpetual source of interest and amus.e.m.e.nt to the Goat family.

They could never quite make out what they were doing, but the Heif-mother finally decided that their journeys must be some religious or national observance.

"People would never struggle about on the ice like that--tied to each other with ropes, too!--unless it was a painful duty," she said. "I consider it very praiseworthy."

Sometimes the young Goats in their invisible eyrie, would go off into shouts of merriment as a group of excursionists crawled slowly into sight; the ladies in their short skirts and large flapping hats, alpenstock in hand, clinging desperately to the guides as they ascended every slippery ice-peak.