What we said, or felt, or how we got over the face of that cliff, I know not. A dim recollection of falling stones and dust showering round us--pieces of treacherous rock giving way in our hands and under our feet, bruising slides, and one desperate jump over the chasm between the cliff and the snow,--and there we were both, standing pale and breathless, straining our eyes for some scarcely expected trace of blood to give us hope. Not a drop tinged the unsullied snow at the place where he had made his first mad bound, nor at the second, nor at the third; but a few paces further on, one ruby-tinged hole showed where the hot blood had sunk through the melting snow. Too excited to feel any uprising of envy, hatred, or malice against my more fortunate companion, I raced along the white incline, leaving him behind reloading his rifle,--which was always a sort of solemn rite with him,--and following, without difficulty, the deep indentations of the animal's hoofs, I came to where the cliff receded into a sort of small bay, with its patch of snow on the same plane with the one I was on, but separated from it by a rugged promontory of cliff and broken rock. Cautiously I scrambled round the point, removing many a stone that seemed inclined to fall and give the alarm to the watchful chamois, and peeping cautiously round the last mass of rock that separated me from the snow-patch, I saw the poor brute, standing not more than sixty yards from me, his hoofs drawn close together under him, ready for a desperate rush at the cliff at the first sound that reached him; his neck stretched out, and his muzzle nearly touching the snow, straining every sense to catch some inkling of the whereabouts of the mischief he felt was near him. With my face glowing as if it had been freshly blistered, a dryness and lumping in my throat, as if I had just escaped from an unsuccessful display of Mr. Calcraft's professional powers, and my heart thud-thudding against my ribs at such a rate that I really thought the gems must hear it in the stillness, I raised my carbine. Once, at the neck just behind the ear, I saw the brown hide clear at the end of the barrel, but I dared not risk such a chance; and so, straining my nerves, I shifted my aim to just behind the shoulder,--one touch of the cold trigger, and as the thin gases streamed off, rejoicing at their liberation, I saw the chamois shrink convulsively when the ball struck him, and then fall heavily on the snow, shot right through the heart. With a who-whoop! that might have been heard half-way to Innspruck, I rushed up to him;--one sweep of the knife--the red blood bubbled out on to the snow that shrunk and wasted before its hot touch, as if it felt itself polluted, and there lay stretched out in all its beauty before me the first gems I ever killed--just as Joseph came up, panting, yelling, and jödling, and rejoicing at my success, without a shade of envy in his honest heart.