en
inopportune night overtook us near the glaciers while in hot pursuit of
the chamois.

This unexpected meeting proved a source of the liveliest interest to me,
inasmuch as this old veteran of the mountains was on the point of
starting on an expedition of a somewhat remarkable character. A pair of
golden eagles, it appeared, had made a neighboring valley the scene of
their frequent ravages and depredations among the cattle and game, and
Hansel was about to organize an expedition to search for, and if
possible despoil, the eyrie. Of late years these birds have become very
rare. Switzerland is nearly, if not quite, cleared of them, while the
Tyrol, affording greater solitude and a larger stock of game, can boast
of eight or at the most ten couples. They are, as is well known, the
largest and most powerful of all the birds of prey inhabiting Europe,
measuring from eight to eight and a half feet in the span, and
possessing terrible strength of beak, talons and wings. A full-grown
golden eagle can easily carry off a young chamois, a full-grown roe or a
sheep, none of them weighing less than thirty pounds; and well-attested
cases have occurred of young children being thus abstracted. In the fall
of 1873 a boy nearly eight years of age was carried away by one of these
birds from the very door of his parents' cottage, situated not far from
the celebrated Koenigsee, near Salzburg.

[Illustration: OUR ARRIVAL AT THE DRIFT-KEEPER'S COTTAGE.]

The breeding-season falls in the month of June, and in the course of the
first fortnight of the succeeding month the young offspring take wing
and commence their raids in quest of pillage on their own account. The
eyrie or nest is an object of the greatest care with the parent birds,
the site being chosen with a view to the greatest possible security,
generally in some crevice on the face of a perpendicular precipice
several hundred feet in height. It is built of dry sticks of wood coated
on the inside with moss. Hansel informed me of a surmise that the eyrie
of this pair would be discovered in the face of the terribly steep
"Falknerwand;" and although I had once before been engaged in a similar
exploit, I could not resist the temptation to join in this expedition,
and despatched on the spot a telegram to the friend who was awaiting my
arrival in Ampezzo in order to make some ascents in the Dolomites,
announcing a detention of some days. This done, we re-entered the cars
and proceeded a f