merely a stranger in that loch, but belonging to some mysterious land in
another hemisphere, whose coast ships with frozen rigging have been
known to visit, driving under bare poles through a month's
snow-storms--to have shot such a creature was an era in our imagination,
from which, had nature been more prodigal, we might have sprung up a
poet. Once, and but once, we were involved in the glory of that event.
The creature had been in a dream of some river or lake in
Kamtschatka--or ideally listening,

"Across the waves' tumultuous roar,
The wolf's long howl from Oonalashka's shore,"

when, guided by our good genius and our brightest star, we suddenly saw
him sitting asleep in all his state, within gunshot, in a bay of the
moonlight Loch! We had nearly fainted--died on the very spot--and why
were we not entitled to have died as well as any other passionate
spirit, whom joy ever divorced from life? We blew his black bill into
pieces--not a feather on his head but was touched; and like a little
white-sailed pleasure-boat caught in a whirlwind, the wild swan spun
round, and then lay motionless on the water, as if all her masts had
gone by the board. We were all alone that night--not even Fro was with
us; we had reasons for being alone, for we wished not that there should
be any footfall but our own round that mountain-hut. Could we swim? Ay,
like the wild swan himself, through surge or breaker. But now the loch
was still as the sky, and twenty strokes carried us close to the
glorious creature, which, grasped by both hands, and supporting us as it
was trailed beneath our breast, while we floated rather than swam
ashore, we felt to be in verity our--Prey! We trembled with a sort of
fear, to behold him lying indeed dead on the sward. The moon--the many
stars, here and there one wondrously large and lustrous--the hushed
glittering loch--the hills, though somewhat dimmed, green all winter
through, with here and there a patch of snow on their summits in the
blue sky, on which lay a few fleecy clouds--the mighty foreign bird,
whose plumage we had never hoped to touch but in a dream, lying like the
ghost of something that ought not to have been destroyed--the scene was
altogether such as made our wild young heart quake, and almost repent of
having killed a creature so surpassingly beautiful. But that was a
fleeting fancy--and over the wide moors we went, like an American Indian
laden with game, journeying to his wigw