98 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



might imagine them exchanging remarks. To watch them and 

 think that they are really Eagles, living their life and un- 

 conscious of a human presence, is very pleasurable, but the 

 cramped and constrained attitude which a small tent pitched on 

 an uneven surface, and which persists in sagging down, alone 

 permits of, makes it impossible to do so for long, continuously. 

 To see is to be racked, and not to be racked is not to see, so, 

 when I next look, the male Eagle is gone. The other, now 

 sitting solitary on its crag, every now and then turning its head 

 towards the lake below, is a fine sight. Suddenly, from the 

 other side of the tent, where all is invisible — for it is pitched 

 against a rock — there is a tremendous rushing sound. I have 

 heard it before, under much the same circumstances, and if it 

 was the stoop, upon prey, of the other Eagle, am sorry indeed to 

 have missed the sight of it. I think it must have been, for it is 

 just the grand and terror-causing sound that a pair of them 

 made when stooping on some Rock-Doves in Cashmere, once — 

 the latter, by the way, eluded every stoop with wonderful 

 activity, looking each time — and no doubt quite truthfully — the 

 very picture of terror. In this case, however, the stoop may 

 have been on a fish, as before. Whatever it is, the sound, joined 

 to the majestic figure on the rock, makes an effective whole, 

 bringing Tennyson's lines on the Eagle strongly to my mind : — 



" He clasps the crag with crooked hands ; 

 Close to the sun, in lonely lands 

 Ring'd with the azure world, he stands. 



" The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls ; 

 He watches from his mountain walls, 

 And like a thunderbolt he falls. " 



Great poets may see everything, without going afield, and the 

 way they are baited by mere great clever men, with nothing of 

 poetry about them, "is a heartbreaking." (Tenez, Messieurs, 

 .... &c, car c'est a vous.) 



After a little, the female Eagle leaves her place, her flight 

 being followed (as is common both with great poets and Eagles) 

 by the cries of Gulls. At 11.30 she returns to the nest, but has 

 hardly settled herself on it when my walking-stick camp-stool, 

 which I had used for supporting the constantly sinking-in roof 

 of the tent, falls with a slight noise, and she goes off again. It 



