the parched lowlands and in winter the upper snows.  Of late years, however, owing to the unsettled state of politics, the shepherds pastured not half the numbers of sheep that Marc’antonio remembered in his youth, and by consequence the deer had multiplied and grown bolder.  He could promise me a stag.  Nay, he even hoped that owing to these same causes the mufri were pushing down by degrees to the seaboard from the inland mountains, which they mostly haunted.  Ah, that was sport for kings!  If fortune, one of these fine days, would send us a full-grown mufrone now!

But we began upon the blackbirds.  I remember yet my first, and how, while I stood trembling a little with that excitement which only a sick man can know who takes up his gun again, Marc’antonio held up the bird and ripped open its crop, filled to bursting with myrtle berries; and the exquisite violet scent they exhaled.

Already I had flung my crutches away, and three weeks later we were after the deer in good earnest.  I had lost all account of time; but winter was upon us, with a wealth of laurestinus flower upon the macchia and a sense of stillness in the air such as we feel at home on windless sunny mornings in December after a night of frost.  We had started before dawn, and crossed the valley by the track leading past our deserted hut and up between the granite pinnacles on which, when the sunset touched them, I had so often gazed.  We had followed it up beyond the pines and over a pass leading out among a range of undulating foot-hills, which seemed to waver and lose heart a dozen times before making up their minds to unite and climb, and be a snowcapped mountain.  But they mounted to the snows at length, and the snows had driven down the stag which, under Marc’antonio’s guidance, I stalked for two hours, and shot before noon-day.  We left him in the track, to be recovered as we returned, and very cautiously made our way to the crest of the next ridge.  I chose a granite boulder for my shelter, gained it, crawled under its lee, and, peering over, had whipped my gun to my shoulder and very nearly pulled the trigger—­was, in fact, looking along the sight—­when I found that I was aiming at a man; and not only that, but at Billy Priske!

I believe, on my faith that thenceforward he owed his life to the shape of his legs—­so unlike a deer’s.

He was picking his way across the dry bed of a torrent in the dip not fifty yards below us, leaping from slab to slab of outcropping granite as a man crosses a brook by stepping-stones; and upon a slab midway he halted, drew off his hat, extracted a handkerchief, and stood polishing his bald head while he took stock of the climb before him.

“Billy!  Billy Priske!”

He tilted his head still higher, towards the ridge and the rock on which I stood against his skyline, frantically waving.

“HOO-ROAR!”

“And to think, lad,” he panted, ten minutes later, as he stretched himself on the heath beside me—­“to think of your mistaking me for a deer!”