GREAT BUSTARD. Al 
was gradually substituted for rye, and, at the price that 
grain fetched in those days, the desire of not using more 
seed than was absolutely necessary brought about the 
invention of the drill, by means of which corn, thus sown, 
was capable of being kept free from weeds with much 
greater facility. First, parties of children were sent into 
the fields to perform this operation, and then speedier, 
if not more thorough, execution was obtained by the use 
of the horse-hoe. Thus, every nest made by a bustard in 
a wheat-field was sure to be discovered—perhaps in time 
to avert instantaneous destruction from the horses’ feet 
or the hoe-blades—perhaps, and this probably much the 
most often, only when the eggs had been driven over and 
smashed, and their contents were pouring out on the 
ground. But even in the first case, instantaneous destruc- 
tion being avoided, the eggs were generally taken up by 
the driver of the hoe (in defiance of the Act of 25th 
Henry VIII., which, though often enforced when smaller 
and less valuable species were concerned, seems in 
the case of the bustard to have been regarded as 
a dead letter), and carried by him to his master or 
mistress. If they were not chilled by the time they 
reached the farm-house they were probably put under a 
sitting hen—for all persons seemed to imagine, till they 
tried, that the rearing of young bustards was as easy 
as the rearing of young turkeys. If, however, there was 
no hope of success in this direction, they appear often 
to have been preserved as natural curiosities, to lie, with 
grotesquely shaped flints and petrified Hcehini (the “‘fairies’ 
loaves” of the district) on the parlour mantel-piece or 
book-shelf till they met with the usual fate of such 
fragile articles, though some four or five specimens are 
known to have escaped all such risks, and are actually 
still in existence. But in either of these cases the 
result was the same. No young birds grew up to fill the 
gaps made in the ranks of the old ones according to the 
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