"No indeed," said the Unwiseman, sadly. "Of course not. It isn"t your fault if an Alp is a toboggan slide or a skating rink instead of a wild animal. It"s all my own fault. I was very careless to come over here and waste my time to see a lot of snow that ain"t any colder or wetter than the stuff we have delivered at our front doors at home in winter. I should ought to have found out what it was before I came."
"It"s very beautiful though as it is," suggested Mollie.
"I suppose so," said the Unwiseman. "But I don"t have to travel four thousand miles to see beautiful things while I have my kitchen-stove right there in my own kitchen. Besides I"ve spent a dollar and twenty cents on an air-gun, and sixty cents for a la.s.soo to hunt Alps with, when I might better have bought a snow shovel. _That"s_ really what I"m mad at. If I"d bought a snow shovel and a pair of ear-tabs I could have made some money here offering to shovel the snow off that hill there so"s somebody could get some pleasure out of it. It would be a lovely place to go and sit on a warm summer evening if it wasn"t for that snow and very likely they"d have paid me two or three dollars for fixing it up for them."
"I guess it would take you several hours to do it," said Whistlebinkie.
"What if it took a week?" retorted the Unwiseman. "As long as they were willing to pay for it. But what"s the use of talking about it? I haven"t got a shovel, and I can"t shovel the snow off an Alp with an air-gun, so that"s the end of it."
And for the time being that _was_ the end of it. The Unwiseman very properly confined himself to the quiet of the carpet-bag until his wrath had entirely disappeared, and after luncheon he turned up cheerily in the office of the hotel.
"Let"s hire a couple of sleds and go coasting," he suggested to Mollie.
"That Mount Blank looks like a pretty good hill. Whistlebinkie and I can pull you up to the top and it will be a fine slide coming back."
But inquiry at the office brought out the extraordinary fact that there were no sleds in the place and never had been.
"My goodness!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the Unwiseman. "I never knew such people. I don"t wonder these Switzers ain"t a great nation like us Americans. I don"t believe any American hotel-keeper would have as much snow as that in his back-yard all summer long and not have a regular sled company to accommodate guests who wanted to go coasting on it. If they had an Alp like that over at Atlantic City they"d build a fence around it, and charge ten cents to get inside, where you could hire a colored gentleman to haul you up to the top of the hill and guide you down again on the return slide."
"I guess they would," said Whistlebinkie.
"Then they"d turn part of it into an ice quarry," the Unwiseman went on, "and sell great huge chunks of ice to people all the year round and put the regular ice men out of business. I"ve half a mind to write home to my burgular and tell him here"s a chance to earn an honest living as an iceman. He could get up a company to come here and buy up that hill and just regularly go in for ice-mining. There never was such a chance. If people can make money out of coal mines and gold mines and copper mines, I don"t see why they can"t do the same thing with ice mines. Why don"t you speak to your Papa about it, Mollie? He"d make his everlasting fortune."
"I will," said Mollie, very much interested in the idea.
"And all that snow up there going to waste too," continued the Unwiseman growing enthusiastic over the prospect. "Just think of the millions of people who can"t get cool in summer over home. Your father could sell snow to people in midsummer for six-fifty a ton, and they could shovel it into their furnaces and cool off their homes ten or twenty degrees all summer long. My goodness--talk about your billionaires--here"s a chance for squillions."
The Unwiseman paced the floor excitedly. The vision of wealth that loomed up before his mind"s eye was so vast that he could hardly contain himself in the face of it.
"Wouldn"t it all melt before he could get it over to America?" asked Mollie.
"Why should it?" demanded the Unwiseman. "If it don"t melt here in summer time why should it melt anywhere else? I don"t believe snow was ever disagreeable just for the pleasure of being so."
"Wouldn"t it cost a lot to take it over?" asked Whistlebinkie.
"Not if the Company owned its own ships," said the Unwiseman. "If the Company owned its own ships it could carry it over for nothing."
The Unwiseman was so carried away with the possibilities of his plan that for several days he could talk of nothing else, and several times Mollie and Whistlebinkie found him working in the writing room of the hotel on what he called his Perspectus.
"I"m going to work out that idea of mine, Mollie," he explained, "so that you can show it to your father and maybe he"ll take it up, and if he does--well, I"ll have a man to exercise my umbrella, a pair of wings built on my house where I can put a music room and a library, and have my kitchen-stove nickel plated as it deserves to be for having served me so faithfully for so many years."
An hour or two later, his face beaming with pleasure, the Unwiseman brought Mollie his completed "Perspectus" with the request that she show it to her father. It read as follows:
THE SWITZER SNOW AND ICE CO.
THE UNWISEMAN, _President_.
MR. MOLLIE J. WHISTLEBINKIE, _Vice-President_.
A. BURGULAR, _Seketary and Treasurer_.
I. To purchase all right, t.i.tle, and interest in one first cla.s.s Alp known as Mount Blank, a snow-clad peak located at Switzerville, Europe. For further perticulars, see Map if you have one handy that is any good and has been prepared by somebody what has studied jography before.
II. To orginize the Mount Blank Toboggan Slide and Sled Company and build a fence around it for the benefit of the young at ten cents ahead, using the surplus snow and ice on Mount Blank for this purpose. Midsummer coasting a speciality.
III. To mine ice and to sell the same by the pound, ton, yard, or shipload, to Americans at one cent less a pound, ton, yard, or shipload, than they are now paying to unscrupulous ice-men at home, thereby putting them out of business and bringing ice in midsummer within the reach of persons of modest means to keep their provisions on, who without it suffer greatly from the heat and are sometimes sun-struck.
IV. To gather and sell snow to the American people in summer time for the purpose of cooling off their houses by throwing the same into the furnace like coal in winter, thereby taking down the thermometer two or three inches and making fans unnecessary, and killing mosquitoes, flies and other animals that ain"t of any use and can only live in warm weather.
V. Also to sell a finer quality of snow for use at children"s parties in the United States of America in July and August where snow-ball fights are not now possible owing to the extreme tenderness of the snow at present provided by the American climate which causes it to melt along about the end of March and disappear entirely before the beginning of May.
VI. Also to sell snow at redoosed rates to people at Christmas Time when they don"t always have it as they should ought to have if Christmas is to look anything like the real thing and give boys and girls a chance to try their new sleds and see if they are as good as they are cracked up to be instead of having to be put away as they sometimes are until February and even then it don"t always last.
This Company has already been formed by Mr. Thomas S. Me, better known as the Unwiseman, who is hereby elected President thereof, with a capital of ten million dollars of which three dollars has already been paid in to Mr. Me as temporary treasurer by himself in real money which may be seen upon application as a guarantee of good faith. The remaining nine million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven dollars worth is offered to the public at one dollar a share payable in any kind of money that will circulate freely, one half of which will be used as profits for the next five years while the Company is getting used to its new business, and the rest will be spent under the direction of the President as he sees fit, it being understood that none of it shall be used to buy eclairs or other personal property with.
"There," said the Unwiseman, as he finished the prospectus. "Just you hand that over to your father, Mollie, and see what he says. If he don"t start the ball a-rolling and buy that old Mountain before we leave this place I shall be very much surprised."
But the Unwiseman"s grand scheme never went through for Mollie"s father upon inquiry found that n.o.body about Chamounix cared to sell his interest in the mountain, or even to suggest a price for it.
"They"re afraid to sell it I imagine," said Mollie"s father, "for fear the new purchasers would dig it up altogether and take it over to the United States. You see if that were to happen it would leave an awfully big hole in the place where Mount Blank used to be and there"d be a lot of trouble getting it filled in."
For all of which I am sincerely sorry because there are times in midsummer in America when I would give a great deal if some such enterprise as a "Switzer Snow & Ice Co." would dump a few tons of snow into my cellar for use in the furnace.
XI.
THE UNWISEMAN PLANS A CHAMOIS COMPANY
The Unwiseman"s disappointment over the failure of his Switzer Snow & Ice Company was very keen at first and the strange old gentleman was inclined to be as thoroughly disgusted with Switzerland as he had been with London and Paris. He was especially put out when, after travelling seven or eight miles to see a "glazier," as he called it, he discovered that a glacier was not a frozen "window-pane mender" but a stream of ice flowing perennially down from the Alpine summits into the valleys.
"They bank too much on their snow-drifts over here," he remarked, after he had visited the _Mer-de-Glace_. "I wouldn"t give seven cents to _see_ a thing like that when I"ve been brought up close to New York where we have blizzards every once in a while that tie up the whole city till it looks like one glorious big snow-ball fight."
And then when he wanted to go fishing in one of the big fissures of the glacier, and was told he could drop a million lines down there without getting a bite of any kind he announced his intention of getting out of the country as soon as he possibly could. But after all the Unwiseman had a naturally sun-shiny disposition and this added to the wonderful air of Switzerland, which in itself is one of the most beautiful things in a beautiful world, soon brought him out of his sulky fit and set him to yodeling once more as gaily as a Swiss Mountain boy. He began to see some of the beauties of the country and his active little mind was not slow at discovering advantages not always clear to people with less inquisitiveness.
"I should think," he observed to Mollie one morning as he gazed up at Mount Blanc"s pure white summit, "that this would be a great ice-cream country. I"d like to try the experiment of pasturing a lot of fine Jersey cows up on those ice-fields. Just let "em browze around one of those glaciers every day for a week and give "em a cupful of vanilla, or chocolate extract or a strawberry once in a while and see if they wouldn"t give ice-cream instead o" milk. It would be worth trying, anyhow."
Mollie thought it would and Whistlebinkie gave voice to a long low whistle of delight at the idea.
"It-ud-be-bettern-soder-watter-rany-way!" he whistled.
"Anything would be better than soda water," said the Unwiseman, who had only tried it once and got nothing but the bubbles. "Soda water"s too foamy for me. It"s like drinking whipped air."
But the thing that pleased the Unwiseman more than anything else was a pet chamois that he encountered at a little Swiss Chalet on one of his tours of investigation. It was a cunning little animal, very timid of course, like a fawn, but tame, and for some reason or other it took quite a fancy to the Unwiseman--possibly because he looked so like a Swiss Mountain Boy with a peaked cap he had purchased, and ribbons wound criss-cross around his calves and his magnificent Alpen-stock upon which had been burned the names of all the Alps he had _not_ climbed. And then the Unwiseman"s yodel had become something unusually fine and original in the line of yodeling, which may have attracted the chamois and made him feel that the Unwiseman was a person to be trusted. At any rate the little animal instead of running away and jumping from crag to crag at the Unwiseman"s approach, as most chamois would do, came inquiringly up to him and stuck out its soft velvety nose to be scratched, and permitted the Unwiseman to inspect its horns and silky chestnut-brown coat as if it recognized in the little old man a true and tried friend of long standing.
"Why you little beauty you!" cried the Unwiseman, as he sat on the fence and stroked the beautiful creature"s neck. "So you"re what they call a shammy, eh?"
The chamois turned its lovely eyes upon his new found friend, and then lowered his head to have it scratched again.