264 CHAMOIS HUNTING. 



litter* for their stables, and are greatly 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 re- 

 fused every offer made them that was just and fair. No, 

 Fve 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."f 



" To be sure not," continued my companion ; " but 

 even my woods, which I always took such pleasure in, 

 they can't leave alone." 



" What is it they do ?" I inquired. 



" Did you not see, as we were going up the mountain 

 this morning, the bark peeled off several trees ? Well, 

 where the bark is off, a worm enters and destroys the 

 tree. I could show you places where there are twenty 



* The peasantry in Germany collect the dead leaves in the forests to 

 make litter for their cattle in the stables in winter. Though of course 

 the forester does not mind their carrying them away, he cannot give to 

 each one indiscriminately permission to do so. Formerly, when there 

 were red-deer in the forests, the constant invasion of their solitude dis- 

 turbed 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. 



t 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 peasants 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 neighbourhood of Donau Stauf, paid regularly every 



