64 HOW I BECAME A FALCONER. 
so lead to the notion in the sportsman’s mind of an excessive fright ; 
for the slow, heavy apparatus which I once saw in a friend’s gun- 
room is not unlike either of these hawks. That under no possible 
circumstances cat it look like a peregrine falcon, I am very certain. 
T have not a single yard of ground of my own, nor any under my 
control on which I can hawk a grouse. I am indebted to an excellent 
friend of mine, who has the Buxton Moors for many a kind invita- 
tion; and to my friend Philip Brocklehurst, Esq., of Swythamley 
Park, for w special permission to fly my peregrines over certain 
limited lands here. And Mr. Brocklehurst must forgive me if I tell 
any of the readers of THE Frenp, who have cared to look through 
what at any time I may have said about grouse-hawking, that they 
owe far more to him than to myself the information which has 
amused them. I should not have cared to take my birds very far 
from home for an hour’s flying, but I can get a flight at grouse in 
less than two hundred yards from my house; and what I have so 
constantly had the opportunity of doing myself, and have done, I 
have been able to describe to others. 
Soon after I set to work in real earnest with the peregrine, I had, 
flying at hack with three or four more, a dark tiercel, which at first 
I thought little of. He seemed to me very shy, and not good- 
tempered. But he was given me by my kind tutor in falconry, of 
whom I have already spoken, who got him from Lundy Island. He 
reached me just as he was able to fly a little. One of the other 
tiercels had escaped before it knew the lure, and this is an awkward 
accident when the bird is too young to care for a live pigeon in a 
string; for, though it may be able to fly only a little, that little is as 
dangerous as a mile, and more provoking, if the moment you get 
within two or three yards of the hawk he immediately flies almost 
thirty. My patience, after much trial, was rather like Mr. Dickens’s 
brandy-and-water when, on board ship, he followed his sick wife up 
and down the saloon with that restorative for a quarter of an hour, 
