68 HOW I BECAME A FALCONER. 
when I mentioned the tiercel that flew through a flock of pigeons 
without noticing them. 
Storm Cloud was shot by a ruffian, some miles from here—I 
confess she was in the act of carrying off one of his pigeons—on the . 
day the Prince of Wales was married, or the day before. I traced 
her to a bird-stuffer, and had the hardest work to get her from him, 
for he had been threatened with an action at law by the shooter if 
he allowed anyone to take her out of the shop. I took the inspector 
of police with me, in order to give the thing a formidable appearance, 
and claimed my property, which I assured the bird-stuffer I could 
swear to, and which certainly had not ceased to be my property 
because a rascal had robbed me of .its chief value—viz., the life. 
“He will spend 51. on it,” said the bird-stuffer to me, “before he 
will let it go. “And I will spend five-and-twenty before I lose even 
her skin,” I replied to the bird-stuffer. It ended in my having the 
skin. Storm Cloud is stuffed by the famous Mr. John Hancock, the 
stuffer of the falcons in the Great Exhibition of 1851; and I see her 
now as I take my eyes for a moment off the paper on which I am 
writing. 
She was the only excellent peregrine I ever saw come fairly to 
hand from a great distance, and yet she ate just as much as she 
liked. A brute that would look at nothing but the lure might easily 
be made to doso; but Storm Cloud would come out of the sky to 
my hand, not flying over and striking, but settling most gently, and 
this with half acrop before she came. She was a most excellent 
rook hawk, no discouragement, such as the quarry escaping in trees, 
daunting her; and she was equally good at grouse and pigeons. It 
is difficult for a person who is not a falconer to understand the 
shock which the news of such a bird’s death gives one. She was 
only lost two days. We wereon her track and close to her, and 
should have undoubtedly had her in a few hours, had the informa- 
tion that I had offered two guineas to anyone who would only show 
