e necessity that lay on
them of approaching their game without noise.

When they had reached a spot where a sheer precipice appeared to render
further progress impossible, the hunter stopped and said in a low tone,
"Look, they are too far off; a bullet could not reach them."

Lewis craned his neck over the cliff, and saw the chamois grazing
quietly on a small patch of green that lay among brown rocks below.

"What's to be done?" he asked anxiously. "Couldn't we try a long shot?"

"Useless. Your eyes are inexperienced. The distance is greater than
you think."

"What, then, shall we do?"

Le Croix did not answer. He appeared to be revolving some plan in his
mind. Turning at last to his companion, he said--

"I counsel that you remain here. It is a place near to which they must
pass if driven by some one from below. I will descend."

"But how descend?" asked Lewis. "I see no path by which even a goat
could get down."

"Leave that to me," replied the hunter. "Keep perfectly still till you
see them within range. Have your rifle ready; do not fire in haste;
there will be time for a slow and sure aim. Most bad hunters owe their
ill-luck to haste."

With this advice Le Croix crept quietly round a projecting rock, and,
dropping apparently over the precipice, disappeared.

Solitude is suggestive. As long as his companion was with him, Lewis
felt careless and easy in mind, but now that he was left alone in one of
the wildest and grandest scenes he had yet beheld, he became solemnised,
and could not help feeling, that without his guide he would be very
helpless in such a place. Being alone in the mountains was not indeed
new to him. As we have already said, he had acquired the character of
being much too reckless in wandering about by himself; but there was a
vast difference between going alone over ground which he had traversed
several times with guides in the immediate neighbourhood of Chamouni,
and being left in a region to which he had been conducted by paths so
intricate, tortuous, and difficult, that the mere effort to trace back
in memory even the last few miles of the route confused him.

There was a mysterious stillness, too, about everything around him; and
the fogs, which floated in heavy masses above and below, gave a
character of changeful wildness to the scenery.

"What a place to get lost in and benighted!" he thought. Then his mind,
with that curious capacity for sudden flight, which is