River Legends; Or, Father Thames and Father Rhine
THE GIANT BRAMBLE-BUFFER
“There {139}was once a Daddyroarer--”
“What the deuce is a Daddyroarer?” hastily interposed Father Thames.
The monarch of the Rhine gave him an indignant glance. “Is this the
way you keep your promise?” he inquired, in a tone of some severity.
“Another such interruption and I shall decline to continue the amusement
of legend-telling. I have no objection, however, to inform you that the
word Daddyroarer signifies a giant, though whence its derivation I am
unable to tell you with any degree of certainty. It probably comes from
two Teutonic words, but I should be sorry to attempt to give them in the
original. There is something about the name, however, which conveys
the idea of a giant. ‘Daddy,’ indeed, being the familiar appellation by
which children occasionally designate their male parent, points, not
so much to the paternal relationship of a giant with mankind, as to his
size and proportions, which are as much larger than those of man as are
the proportions and size of a father to those of his young children. I
presume that the term ‘roarer’ is not intended to convey, as in the case
of a horse, the notion of broken wind, but has rather reference to the
gruff and deep-toned voice which usually characterizes the giant.
“But, be this as it may, I repeat the fact that there was once a certain
Daddyroarer, or giant, who lived among the mountains near a certain part
of my beautiful river. For many years, indeed, in the old, old times,
the men of Rhineland were grievously troubled with giants {140}of
different sorts and sizes. Tradition tells us that they all sprang from
the mighty giant Senoj, who, as is well known, was born, nobody knows
how or where, among the loftiest peaks of the Alps, and is down to this
day popularly known in Rhineland as the father of all giants.
“Certain it is that his descendants, if such they were, proved
exceedingly troublesome to mankind in general, and Rhenish mankind in
particular. These creatures were, indeed, a plague and a pest to the
country. They ate voraciously, and were not particular as to the food
with which they satisfied their appetites. I am not prepared to say
whether or no they were actually cannibals, and will therefore give them
the benefit of the doubt; nevertheless, they were exceedingly unpleasant
neighbours. The quantity of food which they required was alone
sufficient to have placed this fact beyond question, for if you
recollect the feats performed in the way of swallowing by your own old
giant--
‘Robin-a-bobbin-a-Bilberry Ben,
Who ate more victuals than three-score men,’
and consider what would have been the effect upon your country of
half-a-dozen Robins, you will have no trouble in understanding the
difficulty which Rhineland experienced in supporting these worthies.
“What made it much worse, too, was the exceedingly loose notions which
these beings entertained upon the subject of the rights of property.
They apparently laboured under the delusion that the world was made for
giants, and for giants alone--a theory exceedingly convenient for those
who happened to be giants, but the reverse {141}of agreeable to those
who did not come within that somewhat limited category. These excellent
individuals took exactly what they pleased from its owner, without so
much as ‘by your leave’ or ‘with your leave,’ and never for a moment
dreamed of paying the value of the article in question. This was not a
comfortable state of things for the people of the land, who saw their
sheep and oxen, pigs and poultry, and other possessions which they
prized, taken away by the great bullies against whom they dared not lift
a voice nor wag a finger.
“But this was not all. It is bad enough to be robbed by another person,
and not pleasant to be assaulted, but I am not sure whether to be
utterly ignored and despised is not worse than either, especially when
accompanied by such aggravating circumstances as those to which I am now
going to allude. These huge creatures used to go walking about just as
if there were no such things as men and women in the world. They would
kick over a cottage for fun, sit down upon a barn or outhouse and crush
its roof with their weight, out of mere ignorance or wanton folly; and
even now and then set their foot on a human being and crush him into the
earth, as if he were a snake, taking no account whatever of his prayers
and struggles. In fact, they got into the habit of treating people as if
they were merely an inferior part of creation placed upon the earth to
cultivate and make it more useful for giants, and intended to be robbed,
maltreated, trodden under foot, and put out of the way, just when and
how it suited their imperious masters, for whom, and for whose sake
alone, the universe had been created.
“You {142}may well imagine, Brother Thames, that this state of affairs
was pre-eminently unsatisfactory to my poor people. No man’s life or
property was secure, and all improvement was entirely prevented. Indeed,
what was the use of building a house which was liable to be knocked down
or kicked over by a giant at any moment? Of what avail would it have
been to plant a field with wheat, oats, or barley, when at any and
every period of the year all might be trodden down by the ruthless
foot of the same monster, and the reapers possibly be stamped into the
ground, together with the crops which they were gathering? Who would
rear sheep and oxen of which he was sure to be robbed? and who would
spend time, labour, and money upon anything when all was so insecure and
uncertain? So it came about that the population diminished, no houses
were built, few fields were sown, lands went out of cultivation, and it
seemed as if, in a little time longer, the country would be neither more
nor less than a dreary wilderness. Indeed, the whole face of the country
was changed by the strange freaks of the Daddyroarers.
“Sometimes they would amuse themselves by lifting huge masses of rock,
and therewith building a mountain; at another time they would fling
enormous stones at each other in sport, which was pastime anything but
delightful to their neighbours, whose lives and property were thereby
grievously imperilled. And not the least part of the mischief they did
was when they took a fancy to snowball each other, which the survivors
of them still practise, especially in some parts of Switzerland, where
the avalanche, which occasionally overwhelms the unhappy traveller,
although mistakenly attributed to natural {143}causes, is in reality
nothing more than the fall of a larger snowball than usual, hurled by
the mighty arm of one of those mountain giants.
“At the time I speak of there was one particular giant who had for a
long while been remarkably troublesome. Not only was his appetite more
insatiable than that of his brethren, but he was endowed with a spirit
of mischief, which rendered him an especially disagreeable neighbour.
If he met a man he generally gave him a kick, which sent him off fifty
yards up in the air, and in most instances proved fatal. He never passed
a cottage without sitting down on the roof, or kicking the wall down,
and would walk away from a farm with a couple of haystacks, one under
each arm, simply for the love of plunder, and when he really did not
require the hay for his own purposes.
“You {144}will hardly require much argument in order to convince you
that this giant was a most obnoxious person, and was consequently held
in great detestation by all the poor creatures who had the misfortune to
dwell near him. By these he was generally called by the euphonious name
of ‘Old Bramble-Buffer,’ although the title by which he was known among
his own kith and kin was probably quite different, and has not been
handed down to posterity. For many years he tyrannized over the country
round, and the story which I am about to tell you will show how great
his fame and physical strength must have been, and thus remove any
surprise which you might otherwise possibly have felt at the power of
one monster to keep a whole neighbourhood in subjection.
“When their houses had been again and again destroyed, the wretched
inhabitants began to seek shelter in holes in the caves and rocks, in
which they hid themselves, their wives, families, and effects, and only
issued forth by stealth at night, or when they had reason to believe
that their terrible oppressor was away from home. In consequence of
this state of things, our friend the Daddyroarer found his fun somewhat
diminished. He seldom encountered a man now, the opportunities afforded
him for kicking down houses were comparatively rare, and he began to
think life in the country, under such circumstances, rather tedious. It
was in vain that he occupied himself in mountain-building with some of
his fellow-giants, snowballing was cold work, and became tiresome after
a time; and when he once tried to amuse himself by baling out my river,
he found the task too great for even one of his gigantic strength.
{145}He kept on at it for some time, being too stupid to understand
that my river, being well supplied at its sources, and aided by many a
tributary stream and mountain torrent, was in no sort of way affected by
the abstraction of the few millions of gallons of which his puny efforts
robbed it, and his exertions only caused intense mirth to my elves and
demons, without for a moment lessening the volume of water in the river,
or in any way diminishing the strength and rapidity of the current.
“So when Master Bramble-buffer became tired of all these occupations and
amusements he had few resources left. Persons of his description are not
given to literary or intellectual pursuits, and in all probability
both reading and writing were accomplishments entirely unknown to the
ordinary class of giants. Eating, drinking, and sleeping appeared to
be the chief objects for which these creatures existed, except to make
themselves generally disagreeable to their neighbours, which was an
object in which it is quite true that they rarely failed to achieve
complete success. So when the excellent Bramble-buffer had found out
that the task of emptying the Rhine was beyond his powers, and cared
not to fall back upon the old pastimes, of which he had had his fill,
he took to the practice of taking long walks, and journeying into other
countries wherein he might find fresh people to terrify, new fields to
destroy, and a wider scope for the exercise of his vast strength and
malevolent disposition.
“He marched over a great extent of ground, and did a vast deal of
mischief during these excursions. Such was his size and weight, that the
commonest action on his part {146}was sometimes fraught with the most
unexpected results and the direst consequences to mankind. For instance,
if he carelessly slung his walking-stick as he moved along the road,
the implement, being of the size and thickness of a well-grown fir-tree,
brushed off the heads of trees--and of people too, for that matter,
if it came in contact with them,---just as a stick in the hand of an
ordinary mortal knocks over poppies and thistles if employed for that
purpose. Then if he sat down on a small hill to rest, it was as if a man
had jumped with his full weight on a mole-hill of which the earth was
newly thrown up and consequently soft. The ground trembled beneath
his weight as if with the shock of a sudden earthquake; and very often
squashed under him so as to jut out on either side, and cause sudden and
most inconvenient alterations in the fields and woods on each side of
the hill, more especially so in those cases in which dwellings happened
to have been erected thereupon. And woe betide the owner of ponds or