mountain. After them we will extend ourselves and stalk for deer."

He described the deer to me and its habits. It was, as I made out,
an animal not unlike our red deer, but smaller, and of a duller coat;
shy, too, and scarce. He gave me reasons for this. In summer the
Corsican shepherds, each armed with a gun, pasture their sheep on the
mountains, in winter along the plains and valleys; in either season
driving off the poor stag, which in summer is left to range the
parched lowlands and in winter the upper snows. Of late years,
however, owing to the unsettled state of politics, the shepherds
pastured not half the numbers of sheep that Marc'antonio remembered
in his youth, and by consequence the deer had multiplied and grown
bolder. He could promise me a stag. Nay, he even hoped that owing
to these same causes the _mufri_ were pushing down by degrees to the
seaboard from the inland mountains, which they mostly haunted.
Ah, that was sport for kings! If fortune, one of these fine days,
would send us a full-grown _mufrone_ now!

But we began upon the blackbirds. I remember yet my first, and how,
while I stood trembling a little with that excitement which only a
sick man can know who takes up his gun again, Marc'antonio held up
the bird and ripped open its crop, filled to bursting with myrtle
berries; and the exquisite violet scent they exhaled.

Already I had flung my crutches away, and three weeks later we were
after the deer in good earnest. I had lost all account of time; but
winter was upon us, with a wealth of laurestinus flower upon the
_macchia_ and a sense of stillness in the air such as we feel at home
on windless sunny mornings in December after a night of frost.
We had started before dawn, and crossed the valley by the track
leading past our deserted hut and up between the granite pinnacles on
which, when the sunset touched them, I had so often gazed.
We had followed it up beyond the pines and over a pass leading out
among a range of undulating foot-hills, which seemed to waver and
lose heart a dozen times before making up their minds to unite and
climb, and be a snowcapped mountain. But they mounted to the snows
at length, and the snows had driven down the stag which, under
Marc'antonio's guidance, I stalked for two hours, and shot before
noon-day. We left him in the track, to be recovered as we returned,
and very cautiously made our way to the crest of the next ridge.
I chose a granite boulder f