HOMEWARDS. 295 



discontented if they do not immediately get what they 

 require. And yet these are the persons who have been 

 exterminating the game, and would not listen to reason, 

 and who refused every offer made them that was just 

 and fair. No, I 've enough of it ; my duties give me 

 no pleasure now." 



" I well know what the peasants are ; formerly I 

 thought something might be done with them, but I 

 now see it is quite out of the question. Besides, of 

 the game here they had no reason to complain, for it 

 did them no harm, as is the case in the flat land.*" 



course the forester does not mind their carrying them away, he can- 

 not give to each one indiscriminately permission to do so. Formerly, 

 when there were red-deer in the forests, the constant invasion of their 

 solitude disturbed them ; for, as everybody knows, there is nothing 

 the deer value so much as quiet. Besides, the young wood might be 

 injured, or timber stolen, if every one were allowed to work for days 

 together in the woods merely for the asking. 



* In the flat land the game, it is true, often did harm to the crops 

 of the husbandman. But when the damage was paid for paid for 

 even beyond its value the discontent of the peasant did not cease, 

 though many of them calculated on this indemnity as one source of 

 revenue. I have often seen potatoes planted on strips of ground on 

 the skirts of the forest, which no peasant would ever have thought 

 of tilling, had he not hoped to be able to show that deer had been 

 on his field, and so make a claim for loss sustained. The noble 

 proprietor of the forests bordering the Danube, in the neighbour- 

 hood of Donau Stauf, paid regularly every year a considerable sum 

 to the peasants as indemnity for the damage done to their crops by 

 the game ; and according as the price of corn rose these sums were 

 increased. As the money received was generally more than adequate 

 to the loss sustained, the peasantry were satisfied, and found in the 

 arrangement no cause of complaint ; when suddenly, in 1848, although 

 the preceding years the indemnity received by them had been nearly 

 doubled, they discovered that such a state of things could exist no 

 longer ; and thus, supreme authority ceding to popular will, a general 

 extermination of game took place throughout the land. Now how- 



