Birds. 5271 



silence, — could the great owl doze away all his days; and then what 

 a quiet retired breeding-place — what a famous nursery for its young — 

 must these vast cliffs have been ! But it was not my good fortune to 

 see him alive in his own haunts, nor to fetch him down with my own 

 gun ; but, as I was entering the shades of the Via Mala, I met a man 

 emerging, gun in hand, with some weighty burden (which I at first 

 supposed to be a roebuck or chamois) suspended at his back ; this 

 turned out to be the yet warm but lifeless body of a noble eagle owl, 

 which I soon induced him to sell to me, though not without the loss 

 of one much-prized foot and claw, as token of his prowess, and proof 

 of his title to the reward granted by the Syndic for the destruction of 

 a bird of prey, and which no entreaties or bribes of mine could induce 

 him to forego. That evening saw me wandering from house to house 

 in the small town of Thusis, seeking, and for a long time in vain, from 

 those in authority, to obtain a written order for a preparation of corro- 

 sive sublimate, wherewith to preserve the skin of my prize, but with- 

 out which written authority from a magistrate no chemist dared sell 

 the smallest particle of any deadly drug, so little are those un- 

 sophisticated people acquainted with the merits and the common use 

 in more civilized lands of strychnine and all its congeners : that night, 

 too, saw me employed far into the small hours, in what was then, to 

 my inexperienced, unpractical hands, a difficult, laborious task, — in 

 removing the skin from the body ; and I was almost tempted to throw 

 it all away in disgust, at the discovery of a huge rat, swallowed whole, 

 in its stomach, the tail yet remaining in the throat, and which 

 accounted for the finder slaying it, as he said, asleep, gorged as it was 

 with its late unsavoury meal : however, at length my desire for so 

 great a prize triumphed over my fastidious delicacy, and my perse- 

 verance was rewarded by the glorious specimen which I now see 

 amongst many other trophies of many other pleasant scenes. 



The Common Dipper ^or Water Ouzel {Cinclus aquaticus). I am 

 surprised that so accurate an observer as Mr. Bree clearly is, did 

 not chance to see this lively little bird more often, as I found it so 

 frequently, watched it so very often, shot it occasionally, and brought 

 home several specimens, which I had procured in different localities. 

 I can quite understand that the dipper may object to the thick waters 

 of the glacier, so well described by Mr. Bree, and which, moreover, 

 being simply newly-melted snow and ice, is of intense coldness; but 

 there are hundreds of torrents and mountain streams in Switzerland, 

 whose sole origin are the springs welling from the mountain-sides, and 

 hundreds more which flow clear and pure from the dark unfathomable 



