82 FALCONRY. 
place he says "next morning before starting, I sketched 
Sultan Beck and his family. He is feeding his bearcoote— 
hunting with the king of birds being his favorite sport." 
The Persians have a peculiar kind that they train to fly at 
antelopes and to act in concert with dogs. The huntsmen 
‘proceed to a plain, or rather desert, near the seaside with 
hawks on their hands and greyhounds led in a ieash. When 
an antelope is seen they endeavor to get as near as possible, 
but the animal the moment that it observes them goes off at 
a rate that seems swifter than the wind; the horsemen are 
instantly at full speed, having slipped the dogs. If it isa 
single deer they àt the same time fly the hawks, but if a 
herd they wait till the dogs have fixed upon a particular 
antelope. The hawks skimming along near the ground soon 
reach the deer, at whose head they pounce in succession, and 
with so great violence as to confuse the animal so much as to 
stop his speed in such a degree that the dogs can come up 
and in an instant, men, horses, dogs and hawks surround the 
unfortunate deer and capture it. The antelope is supposed 
to be the fleetest quardruped on earth, and the rapidity of 
the chase is said to be wonderful and astonishing, the dis- 
tance run, generally, not exceeding three or four miles. 
In the spring of 1861, on the return from Russia of our 
late Ex-Governor, Thomas H. Seymour, who had been min- 
ister to that country for several years, in conversation with 
him, 1 learned that faleonry was still a favorite sport in the 
East, and that he had joined in the chase several times ; that 
eagles were trained as formerly, and that he had seen falcons 
with their leathern breeches on catch hares and hold them 
by inserting one talon into the game and holding on to the 
turf, or anything that came in the way with the other, and 
that they held on with such tenacity that their limbs would 
be dislocated or torn from their bodies were they not thus 
protected. 
