However, a little while previously I had done a bit of bloodshed which could not have lain on the very tenderest of consciences. The circumstances were these: Near my camp was a patch of sugar-cane, which I noticed bore marks of visitation by some creature with a taste for sweets. The neighborhood, I ascertained, was infested with wild hogs. In the afternoon I surveyed the fields adjoining the sugar-cane, and made my dispositions against night. The moon was at the full. As soon as it rose I took my rifle and repaired to a position selected with reference to a certain tree. This tree had a low--but not too low--horizontal branch, strong enough, as proved by experiment, to bear my weight. Presently, an unmistakable concert of snorting and grunting announced the approach of swine. I picked out their fugleman, a well-grown boar, and fired. He was only wounded, and immediately gave chase after me. I might discharge my second barrel at him, but suppose I should miss? Perched out of his reach, I might miss him with impunity, and load again. All this I had pondered beforehand. So I started for my tree, which I reached some ten seconds sooner than the boar, swung myself up on its low branch, and there took my seat. The boar rushed furiously to and fro, raging like the heathen of the Psalmist, and also, like the Psalmist's people--not a well-ordered democracy like ours, of course--imagining a vain thing. Again and again he quixotically charged the bole of the tree, no doubt thinking it to be myself in a new shape. A fine classical boar he must have been, with his poetic faith in instantaneous metamorphosis. His classicality, however, what with his unmannerly savageness and my own suspension between heaven and earth, I did not feel bound to respect. So, without the slightest emotion of sentimentality, I put a ball through his head.