MARK TWAIN ON THE CHAMOIS.

Thames Star, Volume XI, Issue 3655, 13 September 1880, Page 2

MARK TWAIN ON THE CHAMOIS.

The following chapter is from Mark Twain's latest book, "The Tramp Abroad:', " Next morning we left in the train for Switzerland, and reached Lucerne about ten o'clock at night. The first discovery I made was that the beauty of the lake had not been. exaggerated. Within a day or two I made another discovery. This was that the lauded chamois is not a wild goat; that it is not a horned animal; that it is not shy; that it does not avoid human society; and that - there is no peril in hunting it. The chamois is a black or brown creature, no bigger than a mustard seed ; you do not have to go after it, it comes after you; it arrives in vast herds. and skips and scampers all over your body, inside your clothes ; thus, it is not thy, but extremely sociable ; it is not afraid of man ; on the contrary, it will attack him; its bite is not dangerous, but neither is it pleasant; its activity has not been overstated; if you try to put your finger on it, ii will skip 1,000 times its own length at one jump, and no eye is sharp enough to see where it lights. A great deal of romantic nonsense has been written about the Swiss chamois and the perils of hunting it, whereas the truth is that women and children hunt it, and fearlessly; indeed, everybody hunts it; the huntiug is going on all the time, day and night, in bed and out of it. It is poetic foolishness to hunt it with a gun ; very few people do thaithere is not one man in a milllion who can hit it with a gun. It is much easier to catch it than it is to shoot it, and only do either. Another common piece of exaggeration is that about the ' scarcity • of the chamois. It is the reverie of scarce. Droves of 100,000,000 chamois are not unusual in the. Swiss hotels. Indeed, they are so numerous as to be a great pest." Travellers in other parts of the world besides Switzerland will recognise the troth of this zoological excursion.

The Bishop of Manchester said at Ashton-under-Lync that there was no barm in a duke Living his £100,000 a year if he made a good and worthy use of it, as many dukes did; the harm camo when they lived, as to day many did, selfishly and without any thought of the misery existing arouud them. There were people living to-day in cellar dwellings in Manchester, in hovels in Ash ton and other towns, eating offal, clothed in rags, and not spending as much on their sustenance as the rich man's horse or hound cost. That kind of thing vre had to deplore, and it was a kind of thing which had before now become in tolerable. Tfiß Scottish Guardian states that lately two ladies were set apart with imposition of hands by the bishop of London as deaconesses. The services was held in the chapel of the London Diocesan Deaconess Institution, Westbourne Park. .