GREAT BUSTARD. 11 



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 Echini (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 

 c2 



