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.

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