The next morning we went to take our posts for a chamois drive.  A friend of the guide, whom he had picked up to profit by my coming, took one side of the valley, and I the other, while a boy with an umbrella went down the valley to drive the chamois up to us.  Having posted me, the stupid guide crossed the line of the drive between me and the meadow where the chamois would come to feed, and took his post, hiding nearer the peaks where they had passed the night.  Soon after sunrise they made their appearance on a field of snow which sloped down into the Val,—­nine, young and old.  I shall never see anything prettier than the play of those young chamois on the snow.  They butted and chased each other over the snow, frolicked like kittens, standing on their hind legs and pushing each other, until, probably, they grew hungry, and then came down to the grass to feed.  This was the moment for the driver to come in, and he came up the valley waving his arms and umbrella and shouting.  The chamois came in my direction till they crossed the track of the old hunter, scenting which they halted, sniffed the air, and then broke in panic, the majority running back past the driver and within a few yards of him, so that if he had had a gun he could easily have killed one, and went down the valley out of sight; three came up the valley, taking the flank of the almost perpendicular rocks, within shot of me, but at full gallop, and I fired at the middle one of the group.  They passed behind a mass of rock as I fired, and two came out on the other side.  If I hit one I could not know, for the place was inaccessible, but I hope that I missed.  I have often thought of the possibility that I might have hit the poor beast, and sent him mortally wounded amongst the rocks to die, and I never recur to the incident without pain.  It becomes incomprehensible to me, as my own life wanes, how I could ever have found pleasure in taking the lives of other creatures filling their stations in the world better than I ever did.  The late educated soul pays the penalty of earlier ignorance, but there is no atonement to the victims.

I stayed at St. Martin while the plebiscite and annexation to France took place.  It was a hollow affair, the voting being a mockery, but the Sardinian government had never made itself seriously felt in Savoy, for either good or ill; the people were a quiet and law-abiding race, and while I was in the country I never heard of a crime or a prosecution.  The regiments of Savoyard troops went into the French army with ill will, and there was a bloody fight between them and the French soldiers at Lyons when the former went into the barracks there.