HOW I BECAME A FALCONER. 69 
her to me at liberty and uninjured reached the pigeon fancier. 
Time changes one’s notions, and heals all manner of wounds, as I 
need not say ; but then I would have gone to the stable, taken out 
my horse, and shot him through the head with my own hand, if by 
doing so I could have saved the life of Storm Cloud. 
The fact of a peregrine coming to hand at all is quite exceptional. 
Merlins and sparrowhawks do it, and so do goshawks. The Princess, 
when . has been lost on a grouse, I have taken in the afternoon 
from a stone wall—her crop standing out like a pouter pigeon’s— 
by simply placing my hand under her feet, perhaps with a pigeon’s 
leg or some such trifle on it; but she never came straight to hand 
from the distance, only to the lure. To see this little falcon on the 
wing (she was small, as Storm Cloud was large) was a thing to be 
freshly remembered through life. From a high pitch she shot for- 
ward at the rising of a grouse, ata rate which startled those who 
saw it, and was even greater than Islay’s; though the extraordinary 
‘success of the latter falcon, her almost unequalled speed, and her most 
adroit footing, I suppose, make her at least equal to any other hawk 
which I have trained, I shall speak of her presently. 
I never killed a hare with the peregrine, though I have seen 
enough to know that it may be done with w cast of these birds. 
What the Princess liked best was a grouse; next to that a pigeon ; 
at rooks she was nothing remarkable; but one day she took to 
flying hares in the most astounding manner. I saw her strike a 
hare, I think, twenty times in a succession of stoops, only stopping 
when the hare squatted, which she did frequently. At last she 
came down and grappled, and when I arrived, scarcely able to 
breathe with the exertion of running, hoping that for once in my 
life I might take a hare with a peregrine—when I was, in fact, 
within seven or eight yards of hawk and quarry—the hare jumped 
up very high, pitched off the Princess, who was trying to hold on 
like grim death, and disappeared down a hillside, the hawk stooping 
