A Traveller's Day in the Interior: Not to Kill the Wild Things But to Commune With Mother Nature: The Call for Companionship Yet No Wom. am to Face the Wilderness By Arthur de Carle Sowerby, F.n.c.s., P.2.8.
Sitting one bright winter's day on the grassy side of a steep mountain in west Shansi, where the northern slopes of the great ranges are all covered with dense forests of spruce and larch, and the southern slopes are usually open and free of any heavy vegetation, my senses lulled by the surpassing beauty of the scene that lay before me, I fell to musing. Early that morning I had left camp, away down in a distant valley, with a party of fellow sportsmen bent on the pursuit of the great wild boar, whose home is in these mighty ranges. We had put up a fine old tusker, but, as not infrequently happens on such occasions, fortune favoured him and he had made his escape, breaking through the underbrush and crossing the long, boulder strewn slope with the rush of a steam engine, clearing obstacles with huge bounds, eight fect at a pound, and finally gaining the shoulder of the opposing ridge and the safety of the woods. I had picked up his trail and followed it for miles, only to lose it at last on the grassy slope on which I now sat. It was high noon, and the sun's warm rays beat down upon the mountain side, while there was a stillness in the air that took away its chill.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.