A GAMEKEEPER'S ORNITHOLOGY. 145 



the breeze under their featherless skulls ; and they, 

 too, have no right to a place in this Golgotha, 

 for they do not hurt the game." " No," replied 

 he, " he is not there, but at the farther end of the 

 wood, where I trapped him, and where he now 

 hangs from the branch of a tiller :* he was the 

 plague of my life last summer, and took more 

 young pheasants from under the coops than all 

 the other varmint put together." 



"Oh!" said I, "you mean the sparrowhawk." 

 "Oh no!" he "know'd that chap too, well enough, 

 but it wa'nt he." So to satisfy my curiosity, and 

 perhaps obtain a recent specimen of a rare bird 

 which, indeed, any individual of the Falconidce 

 larger than the sparrowhawk has now become I 

 bade adieu to my friend, and returned with the 

 keeper to a distant part of the wood which we had 

 just quitted. As we threaded our way through the 

 narrow, tortuous paths, or shooting-roads, that in- 

 tersected the thickest parts of the cover, I had 

 ample time for conjecture as to the species of 

 the promised prize. I should have concluded 

 that it was a female of one of the harriers, were it 

 not that these birds, sufficiently rare in all locali- 

 ties, had never, to my knowledge, been observed 

 in this thickly-wooded portion of the weald, and 



* A young growing tree. 



