Now I believe, in all propriety, we ought to have been melancholy, and moralized over the slain. That rich, soft black eye, filming over with the frosty breath of death, and that last convulsive kick of the hind legs, ought perhaps to have made us feel that we had done rather a brutal and selfish thing; but they did not. This is a truthful narrative, and I must confess that our only feeling was one of unmixed rejoicing. I have occasionally moralized over a trout, flopping about amongst the daisies and buttercups, and dying that horrible suffocation death of my causing; but it was never, if I remember right, the _first_ trout I had killed that day. My feelings always get finer as my pannier gets fuller, particularly if it be a warm afternoon, and I have _lunched_. But as for the unfortunate gems, we rejoiced over him exceedingly; we shook hands over him; we sat beside him, and on him; we examined him, carefully, minutely, scientifically, from stem to stem. I firmly believe that I could pick him out at this moment from the thousand ghosts that attend the silver-horned Gemsen König, if I had but the good luck to fall in with his majesty and his charmed suite. Joseph's ball had struck him high up on the neck, but had not inflicted any thing like a severe wound. Had we fired on him from below, he would have scaled the cliffs in a moment, and been no more seen, at least by us; but as he knew that the mischief was above him, he dared not ascend--to descend was impossible; and so, getting to a certain extent pounded, he gave me the rare chance of a second shot. Long we sat and gazed at the chamois; and the wild scene before us--never shall I forget it!--shut in on three sides by steep and frowning cliffs, in front the precipice, and far, far down, the wild rocky valleys, divided by shivered ridges, rising higher and higher till they mounted up into the calm, pure snow range, set in the frame of the jutting promontories on each side of us--looking the brighter and the "holier" from the comparative shade in which we were. Not a sound but the occasional faint "swish" of the waterfall that drained from the snow-bed,--not a living thing _now_ but our two selves standing side by side on the snow. We had killed the third, and there he lay stiffening between us! But, hillo! Joseph! we are nearly getting sentimental, after all, over this brute, (that I should say so!) who has all but broken our necks already, and who in all human probability will do so entirely before we have done with him. Fish up the decanter, and let us have a schnaps over our quarry; my throat and lips are burning, as if I had lunched off quicklime. Well, what are you fumbling at? Oh, horror! Joseph's hand returns empty from the bag, with a large cut on one of the fingers--weeping tears of blood! The bottle is smashed!--smashed to atoms! and the unconscious Joseph has had the celestial liquor trickling down his back--how long he know not, and care not; it is "gone, and for ever!"