110 CHAMOIS HUNTING. 



After having spent some weeks in the mountains I re- 

 turned direct to Munich, and the very first observation 

 a friend made on meeting me again was, that my eyes 

 had a different expression : " You have got," he said, " a 

 chamois-hunter's eyes." He had not, probably, remarked 

 the peculiarity in this class of men as I had done ; but 

 he saw something strange in my looks, and knowing 

 where I had been, at once attributed the appearance 

 which so struck him to my recent pursuits.* 



I remember too, when once at the Konigs See, and 

 while at the house of the forester, waiting till the rain 

 ceased, an under-gamekeeper came into the room. He 

 had been out three days on the mountains and had just 

 returned. The man's look would have struck any one. 

 At that time all relating to mountain life was strange to 

 me, and the whole appearance of the new comer excited 

 my curiosity. He was tall, gaunt, and bony ; his brown 

 and sinewy knees were bare, and scratched and scarred ; 

 his beard was black and long, his hair shaggy, and 

 hunger was in his face ; the whole man looked as if he 

 had just escaped from the den of a wolf, where he had 

 been starved and in daily expectation of being eaten. 

 But it was his eyes — it was the wild staring fixedness of 

 his eyes — that kept mine gazing on him. The bent eagle- 

 nose, the high, fleshless cheek-bones, added to their 

 power. There was no fierceness in them, nor were they 

 greedy eyes ; but they were those of a man who had 



* Not a week after penning these lines, I happened to be looking 

 through a volume of Hazlitt, and found the following remarks, which 

 at once reminded me of my own observations on the look of the cha- 

 mois-hunter. I was very pleased to find them, as they confirmed what 

 I had said. He is speaking of Eaphael : " His figures have always an 

 m-door look . . . and want that wild uncertainty of expression which 

 is connected with the accidents of nature and the changes of the ele- 

 ments." — The Round Table : On Gusto. 



