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“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 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 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 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.