Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 2 (1878).djvu/100

78 together without years of labour and close observation of the natural aptitude of different individuals. One I took from his work as an engineer, another as a gamekeeper, a third as odd man to an Irish squireen, and it took me just three years to trace one of them whose handiness, as a boy (under the Maharajah), I had remarked long ago, but of whom I had lost sight.

There were other difficulties ten years ago in the way of all who cared to take up falconry, but who could only do so on a small scale. Keeping hawks without a falconer was a drag and a tie. If left behind to the mercy of keepers or stable boys, during the temporary absence of their owners, they were almost certain to come to grief; while taking them about on visits did not always answer. I used to do this until I found my friends so unappreciative with regard to hawks, that if I continued this course I should have very few visits to pay! Having no falconer then, I had to choose between my friends and my hawks. I chose the latter,—to my mind, the truest friends a man can have,—but I cannot quite expect other and less enthusiastic falconers to look at things in exactly the same light as I did.

Many would have enjoyed the use of a hawk or two for the hawking season, who did not care to be bothered with them during the long period of moulting and uselessness. Yet the supply was too uncertain to make it sale to get rid of the hawks when they began to moult, as should always be done except in the case of Goshawks or special favourites. It does not pay to moult a Peregrine or Merlin, since their performances after moulting rarely come up to their first season's form.

So long as the Hereditary GraudGrand [sic] Falconer of England, the Duke of St. Albans kept hawks (for doing—or not doing—which, he receives £1000 a-year from the State) it was, of course, possible to place hawks temporarily, or for the moult, under the care of his falconer, John Pells. Pells was always most obliging, and had plenty of time to attend to the wishes of amateurs, since the Duke's establishment was limited to half-a-dozen hawks, on which, including the falconer's wages, he expended only £-200 a-year out of the £1000 he received and, I believe, still receives. But some ten years since the present Duke, in an economical fit, thought he might as well save a little more of the sum allowed him by the State as Grand Falconer; so, heedless of the motto "noblesse oblige" he broke up the establishment, and sent poor old Pells