rhead, on three
sides, vast cliffs of grey-green rock were capped by cliffs of ice;
but the glacier stream came not to them, but flowed away by the
farther slopes, and only now and then huge ice masses fell on the
valley side. In this valley it neither rained nor snowed, but the
abundant springs gave a rich green pasture, that irrigation would
spread over all the valley space. The settlers did well indeed
there. Their beasts did well and multiplied, and but one thing
marred their happiness. Yet it was enough to mar it greatly. A
strange disease had come upon them and had made all the children
born to them there--and, indeed, several older children
also--blind. It was to seek some charm or antidote against this
plague of blindness that he had with fatigue and danger and
difficulty returned down the gorge. In those days, in such cases,
men did not think of germs and infections, but of sins, and it
seemed to him that the reason of this affliction must he in the
negligence of these priestless immigrants to set up a shrine so
soon as they entered the valley. He wanted a shrine--a handsome,
cheap, effectual shrine--to be erected in the valley; he wanted
relics and such-like potent things of faith, blessed objects and
mysterious medals and prayers. In his wallet he had a bar of
native silver for which he would not account; he insisted there was
none in the valley with something of the insistence of an inexpert
liar. They had all clubbed their money and ornaments together,
having little need for such treasure up there, he said, to buy them
holy help against their ill. I figure this dim-eyed young
mountaineer, sunburnt, gaunt, and anxious, hat brim clutched
feverishly, a man all unused to the ways of the lower world,
telling this story to some keen-eyed, attentive priest before the
great convulsion; I can picture him presently seeking to return
with pious and infallible remedies against that trouble, and the
infinite dismay with which he must have faced the tumbled vastness
where the gorge had once come out. But the rest of his story of
mischances is lost to me, save that I know of his evil death after
several years. Poor stray from that remoteness! The stream that
had once made the gorge now bursts from the mouth of a rocky cave,
and the legend his poor, ill-told story set going developed into
the legend of a race of blind men somewhere "over there" one may
still hear to-day.

And amidst the little population o