SWANS 
O properly appreciate swans we should have 
lived in the time of Queen Elizabeth, for 
Aat that period there were 900 swanneries in 
* England; and each owner of a swannery had 
his own brand, which was cut into the beaks 
of the cygnets. The first Monday of August 
was the date when the Crown, and also the Dyers 
& Vinters Co. did their branding in the swanneries 
on the Thames. 
There were plenty of swanherds to take care of 
the birds, and there was a Royal Swanherd who was 
a great personage in the royal establishment. The 
first Monday in August must have been exciting, if 
the catching of the cygnets for branding was as 
greatly resented by the parent birds as was the case 
when I simply tried to examine a little more closely 
the cygnets of a swan family on the Thames one 
August day not long ago. I.shall never forget the 
fierce aspect of the male swan. He advanced 
toward me hissing like a snake; his short legs and 
awkward gait only made his long neck and threaten- 
ing wings seem more formidable. I quickly in- 
formed him, in swan esperanto, that I did not think 
his smutty down-covered darlings were worth look- 
ing at anyway, meanwhile I beat a discreet retreat. 
In England, during the reign of Edward IV (1483), 
the swan was declared a royal bird, and a law was 
enacted that ‘‘No person who did not possess a 
freehold of a clear yearly rental of five marks” 
was permitted to keep swans. During the reign of 
Henry the VII, a year’s imprisonment and a fine, 
at the king’s will, was the punishment for stealing a 
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