60 HOW I BECAME A FALCONER, 
that there was a chivalry in this, for which I should be thanked. 
But I felt that they were discarded only because they were out of 
sight, and I wished to bring them back again, to place them 
thoroughly before the gaze of others. I was sanguine enough to 
think that, with my own pen, I could give them once more a place 
in the world. 
I failed. I did not sufficiently take into consideration the physical 
change which has, in the last hundred years, passed over the face of 
the country. Neither, perhaps, did I enough remember this singular 
truth: that sport in Britain, especially in England, is not now as of 
old, permitted to depend chiefly upon toil, courage, endurance, 
uncertainty, and skill, but is the child of ease and luxury, and the 
love of slaughter—artificial in its appliances, and looking to the 
result with a grasping eagerness which ought to belong only to the 
means. 
