MARK TWAIN ON THE CHAMOIS.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume VII, Issue 1103, 24 August 1880, Page 2

MARK TWAIN ON THE CHAMOIS.

The following chapter is from Mark Twain's latest book, " The Tramp Abroad :"

" Next morning we left in the train for Switzerland, and reached Lucerne about ten o'clock at night. The first discovery I made was that the beauty of the lake had not been exaggerated. Within a day or two I made another discovery. This was that the chamois is not a wild goat ; that it is not a horned animal ; that it is not shy, that it does not avoid human society ; and there is no peril in hunting it. The chamois is a black or brown, creature, not bigger than mustard seed ; you do not have to go after it, it comes after you ; it-arrives ■in vast herds und skips all over your body, inside your clothes ; thus it is hot shy but extremely sociable ; is not afraid of mau ; on the contrary it will attack him ; its bite is not dangerous, but neither is it pleasant ; its activity has not been overstated ; if you try to put your finger on it it will skip 1000 times its own length at one jump, and so no eye is sharp enough to see where it alights. A great deal of romantic nonsense has been written about the Swiss chamois and the peril of hunting it, whereas the truth is that women and children, hunt it,- and fearlessly ; indeed, everybody hunts it ; the hunting ingoing r Oh all the time,: day and night,. Jin. bed and out of it. " It is poetic foolishness to hunt it with a gun ; very few people do that — there is not one man in a million who can hit it with a gun. It is ■ much /easier to catch it. than it is to shoot it, and only the experienced chamois hunter can do either. Another common piece of exaggeration is about the scarcity of the chamois. It is the reverse of scarce. Droves of 100,000 chamois are not unusual in the Swiss hotels. Indeed they are so numerous as