124 CHAMOIS HUNTING. 



"Oh," said he, laughing, "the Tyrolians are afraid 

 of the Bavarian balls : they never hold out, but di- 

 rectly they espy one of us they take to their heels. 

 Some years since a Tyrolian was missed : he had come 

 over, it seems, and had been on the Plau Berg, but 

 he never returned. His friends came and searched 

 for him, and made every possible inquiry, but all in 

 vain ; he was never heard of again. Well, since then 

 the Tyrolians have grown shy : they think perhaps 

 that if they come, they too may not find their way 

 home again." 



The manner in which my friend Maxl told this 

 story, made me strongly suspect he knew very well 

 why the Tyrolian never went home again. Of course 

 he vowed that he knew nothing of the matter, and it 

 certainly is possible he did not; but there was an 

 archness and a gusto in the way he spoke of it, that 

 made me feel sure of the contrary. As the man's 

 friends never found him, there was certainly a pos- 

 sibility that he had fallen over a precipice, and that 

 the body had rolled down into some deep impene- 

 trable chasm. Such a mountain is of immense extent ; 

 the rents, and clefts, and hollows are innumerable, 

 and if the body had by chance slipped under one of 

 the thousand fragments of rock that are lying about, 

 this circumstance alone might be enough to hide it 

 from the eye of the most careful seeker. Long after, 

 perhaps some chance passer-by might stumble over a 

 few bleached bones, but no one would know whose 

 they were or aught of the dead man's story. 



