Fine Old Timber, Part Of That Mysterious Ciminian Forest Which Still Covers A Large Tract, From Within Whose Ample Shade One Looks Downhill Towards The Distant Orte Across A Broiling Stretch Of Country.

There were golden orioles here, calling to each other from the tree-tops.

My friend, having excavated himself a couch among the troublesome prickly seeds of this plant, was soon snoring - another senile trait - snoring in a rhythmical bass accompaniment to their song. I envied him. How some people can sleep! It is a thing worth watching. They shut their eyes, and forget to be awake. With a view to imitating his example, I wearied myself trying to count up the number of orioles I had shot in my bird-slaying days, and where it happened. Not more than half a dozen, all told. They are hard to stalk, and hard to see. But of other birds - how many! Forthwith an endless procession of massacred fowls began to pass before my mind. One would fain live those ornithological days over again, and taste the rapturous joy with which one killed that first nutcracker in the mountain gulley; the first wall-creeper which fluttered down from the precipice hung with icicles; the Temminck's stint - victim of a lucky shot, late in the evening, on the banks of the reservoir; the ruff, the grey-headed green woodpecker, the yellow-billed Alpine jackdaw, that lanius meridionalis - -

And all those slaughtered beasts - those chamois, first and foremost, sedulously circumvented amid snowy crags. Where are now their horns, the trophies? The passion for such sport died out slowly and for no clearly ascertainable reason, as did, in its turn, the taste for art and theatres and other things. Sheer satiety, a grain of pity, new environments - they may all help to explain what was, in its essence, a molecular change in the brain, driving one to explore new departments of life.

And now latterly, for some reason equally obscure, the natural history fancy has revived after lying dormant so long. It may be those three months spent on the pavements of Florence which incline one's thoughts to the country and wild things. Social reasons too - a certain weariness of humanity, and more than weariness; a desire to avoid contact with creatures Who kill each other so gracelessly and in so doing - for the killing alone would pass - invoke specially manufactured systems of ethics and a benevolent God overhead. What has one in common with such folk?

That may be why I feel disposed to forget mankind and take rambles as of yore; minded to shoulder a gun and climb trees and collect birds, and begin, of course, a new series of "field notes." Those old jottings were conscientiously done and registered sundry things of import to the naturalist; were they accessible, I should be tempted to extract therefrom a volume of solid zoological memories in preference to these travel-pages that register nothing but the crosscurrents of a mind which tries to see things as they are.

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