ng was a self-taught
melody--one of those wild and delicious voluntaries in which conscious
power displayed itself; now, astounding the ear by efforts the wildest
and most capricious, now subduing the sense by notes plaintive almost to
bring tears. In these latter it was that he mingled his cry of "Maria,
huelf--huelf--huelf uns, Maria!"--words so touching and so truthful in
their accents that at every time the Engadiner beard them he crossed
himself twice on the forehead and the breast; which devout exercise, I
am constrained to say, had in his case more of habit than true piety, as
the sequel proved.

I forget whether it is not Madame de Seuderi has built a little theory
upon the supposition that every mind has within it the tendency to yield
to some one peculiar temptation. The majority, I fancy, have not limited
their weakness to units. Poverty has so many wants to be supplied,
wealth so many seductions to offer, that it may be affirmed he is not
worse than his fellows whose heart has only one undefended bastion. I am
not anxious to claim for my Engadiner any more than ordinary powers of
resistance: neither his race nor his country, the habits of his life,
nor his principles--if it be permitted to use the word--had taught him
such self-control; but, if they had--if they had steeled his nature
against every common seduction, they could not have stifled within him
the native passion for bird-catching, or, what is very much akin to it,
bird-stealing. He would as soon have thought it needful to restrict his
lungs in their requisite quantity of atmospheric air, as to curb what
he regarded as a mere human instinct. If Engadiners were made for any
thing, it was for bird-catching: no one did any thing else, thought,
spoke, or dreamt of any thing else, in the Engadine. It was not a
pastime, or a caprice; it was not that the one was skilful, or that the
other was adroit at it, but the whole population felt that birds were
their natural prey, and that the business of their life was comprised
in catching, feeding, training, sending, and selling them all over
the globe--not only in Europe, but over the vast continent of America.
Wherever birds had fanciers, wherever men cared for the tints of plumage
or the warbling mellowness of their notes, there an Engadiner was sure
to be found. And who has ever studied their nature like one of these
mountaineers, who knows all their habits and their tastes, their seasons
of migrating and re