Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 2 (1878).djvu/96

74 gentlemen stand unrivalled; the "mens sana in corpore sano" which, when occasion arises, carries English gentlemen sturdily and cheerily through such little undertakings as a "Ride to Khiva."

Country-house life has greatly changed since those good old days. It remains to be seen what will be the effect on the coming race of our present fashionable modes of killing, rather than utilizing, time: the sexes separating for the day (to the no small loss of both); the gentlemen to go through the incidentless routine of the "hot corner," with its maximum of slaughter and minimum of exercise, bodily or mental; the ladies to the sofa and the latest French novel, or the barouche and the talking of scandal, the propensity of the fair sex to which is far too inveterate to be checked by aught but the presence of men. No wonder that we hear of new-fangled nervous disorders such as our ancestors never dreamed of, affording a rich harvest to the lucky inventors of "neuraline," "nervine," "zelodyne," and such like fearfully and wonderfully named compounds!

But I am getting out of my depth, and shall be pulled up by the Editor if I break out into an essay on the impending degeneracy of the British variety of the human species, and the possibility of its eventful return—by an inversion of the Darwinian process—to the Simian type; which pleasing result may some day perhaps afford an interesting subject for retrospective enquiry to the New Zealander of the remote future as he lounges on the hoary ruins of London Bridge.

To return to my subject. I gave up Falconry in England; tried France, where there is much more to be done; and then embarked with fifteen hawks and no falconer for the New World.

I had some sport—probably because I had no falconer. But military duties kept me in Canada—not a good hawking country, except for Bitterns, which are everywhere abundant, and of which I have taken four in an hour with a single Goshawk. The bitter cold of the Canadian winter and the almost total absence of visible animal life for six months in the year, are terribly against the falconer, whose happy hunting grounds in America are the western prairies, with their packs of Pinnated Grouse. The course of duty brought me again to England in 1870, since which time 1 have been engaged in fighting against fate, hoping against hope, attempting an impossibility—the revival of Falconry in England.