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.
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