52 8 Notes on Sport and Travel x 



the barrel, but I dared not risk such a chance ; and 

 so, stringing my nerves, I shifted my aim to just 

 behind the shoulder, — one touch of the cold trigger, 

 and as the thin gases streamed off rejoicing at their 

 liberation, I saw the chamois shrink convulsively 

 when the ball struck him, and then fall heavily on 

 the snow, shot right through the heart. With a 

 who-whooop ! that might have been heard half-way 

 to Innspruck, I rushed up to him ; one sweep of the 

 knife, — the red blood bubbled out on the snow that 

 shrunk and wasted before its hot touch as if it felt 

 itself polluted, — and there lay, stretched out in all its 

 beauty before me, the first genise I ever killed, 

 just as Joseph came up, panting, yelling, dcnd Jodting, 

 and rejoicing at my success without a shade of envy 

 in his honest heart. 



Now I believe, in all propriety, we ought to have 

 been melancholy, and moralised over the slain. 

 That rich, soft, black eye filming over with the 

 frosty breath of death, and that last convulsive kick 

 of the hind -legs ought perhaps to have made us 

 feel that we had done rather a brutal and selfish 

 thing ; but they did not. This is a truthful narrative ; 

 and I must confess that our only feeling was one of 

 unmixed rejoicing. I have occasionally moralised 

 over a trout flopping about among the daisies and 

 buttercups, and dying that horrible suffocation -death 

 of my causing ; but it was never, if I remember 

 right, the Jirsi trout I had killed that day. My 

 feelings always get finer as my pannier gets fuller, 



