It would be too long a story to set down all the answers I received from the many persons whom I questioned here and there in my daily peregrinations. One man was sorry he had not heard of me sooner. A cow had been killed by lightning somewhere on the mountains, a week or two before. That would have been my opportunity. Ravens are sure to be on hand at such a time. But it was too late now, as they never touch flesh after it has begun to spoil. Another man, a German, living some miles out of the village, said, “Well, in my country we call them ravens, but here they call them crows.” They were a nuisance; he had to kill them. He knew smaller black birds, in flocks, but no larger ones. He and the apothecary--who now and then laughed good-humoredly at my continued failure, as I stopped to pass the time of day with him, or to ask him about the way to some waterfall--were, as well as I remember, the only witnesses for the negative; so that the question was no longer as to the presence of the birds, but as to the degree of their commonness and the probability of my seeing them. It would be too much to say that the whole town was excited over the matter, but at least my few fellow boarders at the hotel either felt or simulated a pretty constant interest. “Well,” one or another of them would say, as I dragged my weary steps up the hill to the door, at the end of a day’s outing, “well, have you seen any ravĕns yet?” One day there appeared at the dinner-table a bright, rosy-faced, clear-eyed, wholesome-looking boy of nine or ten years, and the gentleman who had brought him in as his guest presently introduced him to me, with the remark that perhaps “Bob” could give me information upon my favorite topic. Bob smiled bashfully, and I began my examination. Yes, he said, he had seen ravens. How often, should he say? Why, almost every day. When did he see them last? Yesterday. How many were there? One. It was flying over. Did it call? Yes, they always did. How much bigger than a crow was it? Not much, but the voice was very different. This last was a model answer,--not at all the answer of a dishonest witness, or of an honest witness ambitious to make out a story. It was impossible to doubt him (his father and his older brother confirmed his testimony afterward), and yet I had been out of doors almost constantly for more than two weeks, and so far had not obtained the first glimpse of a large, wide-ranging, high-flying bird which this boy--who lived a few miles out of the village, it is true--saw nearly every day. Verily, as the unsuccessful man’s text has it (and a comfortable text it is), “the race is not to the swift, ... nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”