no 



ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES. 



visits, which, like those of other eupeptic relatives, are 

 apt to extend to the end of the winter. Panthers are 

 still found in twenty-six or twenty-seven States, the 

 doubtful twenty-seventh being South Carolina, where 

 some of them are supposed to lurk in the highland 

 gorges of Pickens County. In Texas and the North- 

 western Territories wolves are still too plentiful to risk 

 a high scalp-bounty; east of the Mississippi they occur 

 only sporadically, in North Carolina chiefly, and in the 

 wild border-counties between Tennessee and West Vir- 

 ginia. But who would suppose that in the soi-disant 

 birth-land of civilization — in France — several hundred 

 of them are killed every year, and not in the Pyrenees 

 merely, but on the Belgian frontier and in the Western 

 Cevennes, hardly two hundred and fifty miles from 

 Paris ! 



Even in Western Germany the wild fauna of the 

 mountain-regions is by no means confined to the rela- 

 tives of the sleek preserve-pets. About fourteen years 

 ago I paid a visit to the famous Salzbad of Allendorf, 

 near Cassel, where two of my former school-mates were 

 surveying a tramway from the salt-works to the coal-pits 

 of the Kaufunger-Wald. The surveyor and his assistant 

 were both Hainault men, born and bred in the wilds of 

 the Ardennes, and on being called to a place in the 

 woods where a spoor in the fresh snow had puzzled all 

 their workmen, they at once recognized the track of an 

 old lynx, — a rather frequent visitor to the sheep-folds of 



