In the Neighbourhood of Salisbury. 157 



utilitarian mania would seem to have come to the rescue, and the 

 massacre ceases. And here let me remind my readers, that in some 

 districts where the persecution has raged with greater fury than 

 usual, man has found it necessary to re-import their much-maligned 

 friends, to do that for them which they could not do for themselves, 

 i.e., to reduce the number of that mighty army, '' the palmer- worm, 

 the canker-worm, and the caterpillar,^^ which, in the absence of the 

 consumer, were quickly over-mastering their crops. 



Another deeply-merited punishment, which often accrues from 

 man's avaricious temperament, and his undue interference with the 

 balance of Nature, may be seen in the oft-recurring paroxysms of 

 disease, which play as much havoc amongst the Grouse as the pesti- 

 lence amongst human beings. The cause is not far to seek. The 

 grouse-moor, over which the Peregrine, and at times the Moor Buz- 

 zard, and Harrier, were accustomed from time immemorial to exercise 

 their clerical right, then undisputed, and ungrudged, of taking tithe 

 in kind, no more resounds to their sharp shrill cry of delight, or 

 warning, as mate calling to mate, spake to each other of the coming 

 feast, or toyed around in ever ascending circles, over the scene of 

 some successful chase ; and the Grouse, undisturbed by their aerial 

 and hereditary foes, increase in such undue proportion that the land 

 will not rightly bear them ; while the sickly produce of a late hatch, 

 or weakly parents, propagate their inherited maladies, till they spread 

 as a dire scourge over whole districts at a time. Whereas, had 

 there been, perhaps, a single pair of Peregrines to act as keepers 

 over the moor, not one of those weakly birds would have had a 

 chance of propagating the mischief, as they would have been the 

 first birds marked out for the Falcon's meal. " Why," do you ask? 

 For the same reason that you, good reader, would take hold of the 

 nearest tool to hand that answered your purpose, or the short cut 

 across the common, instead of going round by the road. For the 

 same reason that the cowardly bully at school intuitively picks out 

 the shrinking sensitive boy, on whom to work his baneful will, 

 avoiding the stronger pluckier mind, that would anyhow make a 

 fight for it, ere he gave in. Yes ! as in the school, as in the world 

 at large, so on the moor, " might is right," " the weaker goes to 



M 2 



