HOW I BECAME A FALCONER. 83 
*  TLought to apologise if in giving my history as a falconer I have 
become too biographical, and made it, in the last paragraph, too 
generally personal. Let me, however, avoid such an error in future 
by going at once into the subject which is to occupy the greater part 
of this chapter—viz., that of the goshawks. 
My first feeling about hawking was, I well remember, that I should 
like to carry a bird on my hand which would dash off it on occasion, 
much after the manner of greyhounds from the slips; and when I 
was told that the chief excellence of a peregrine consisted in the 
height of its pitch, and that the glorious thing was to seo it start 
out of the sky after its quarry, I was very much disappointed. I 
thought I should never care for a system of flying which placed 
the trained bird at sucha distance fromits master. The flying from 
a pitch seemed to me, when considered as a part of sport—which is 
to an extent artificial—too like nature, and too little like art; while 
flying from the fist, or “at the bolt” as itis called, had the charm 
which I seemed to have sought in falconry, for there was the disci- 
plined animal positively leaving the touch of your glove to pursue 
the flying quarry. 
Perhaps I have not entirely overcome that feeling now, though I 
am a thorough game hawker, and consider a stoop from a groat 
height not only one of the finest and most invigorating sights in 
the world, but as the result of our art at its very highest. Yet we 
must not forget, in all our worship of the peregrine after game, 
that in heron-hawking the falcon starts from the fist. Of course, 
in that great sport there are numberless stoops—more, probably’ 
than in any other, except lark-hawking—but the first flight is not 
from above. I am sorry that I know nothing practically of heron- 
hawking; still I can realise it all from beginning to end. 
However, my first love, and that perhaps of others in their 
early days of falconry, finds its home in the goshawk; for this 
bird, like the sparrowhawk and merlin, starts from your hand, 
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