156 The Home of the Harpy-Eagle. [ March, 
falcons, and preferred them to tame panthers, which were used by 
pot-hunters to capture deer and young peccaries. Devega, the 
biographer of Hernan Cortez, says that the satrap of a Mexican 
province presented the Great Captain with a hunting-eagle, called 
El Hidalgo del aire, the prince of the air, whose value was estimated 
at the price of ten slaves; and adds, that the only bodily injury 
which Cortez ever received during his adventures in Mexico, was 
inflicted by this eagle. The cruel Spaniard used to prick the bird 
with his dagger, because he would not obey the hood, z. e., did 
not wait for the signal of attack, as the Castilian gerfalcons were 
taught to do, and once, when the eagle repeated this error and 
took wing without proper authority, the angry hunter sent a pis- 
tol ball after him, “ to teach him manners.” The shot cured him 
of his bad habits forever, for it broke his head, and the prince of 
the air tumbled down with his talons quivering in the death 
shudder.- Cortez dashed his pistol to the ground and knelt down 
in the hope of saving the victim of his passion; but Hidalgo was 
booked for the happy hunting grounds. Three or four times he 
tried to rise to his feet, and then lay still, his strength ebbing 
away with his life blood. But before he resigned himself to 
death, he raised his head once more, grabbed the best finger of 
the right hand of his cruel master, and bit it through—-crushed it 
completely, “ so as not to leave the world unavenged,” as Devega 
says. 
The Princes of Tlascala wore the image of the crested eagle on 
their breasts and on their shields, as a symbol of royalty, and 
could not easily have chosen a fitter emblem. The aguila real 
does not wear his crown in vain, he is a true monarch and em- 
bodies all the ideal characteristics of a wild warrior. Proud, 
strong, swift, wary and bold to a surprising if not to a sublime 
degree, he meets no superior but the omnipotent biped that has 
not inappropriately been called the god of the animal world, and 
_ among the tribes of his own element he recognizes neither a chief 
nor a rival. The tropical forests between the Gulf of Mexico and 
the head-waters of the La Plata are his domain, and he has 
chosen his home well. There wilĻbe forests and game and wild 
liberty in those regions after the last wilderness between Texas 
and Labrador has disappeared and all Northern America is either 
2 a treeless waste, like Turkistan, or a hive of industry like Ger- 
many and Great Britain. The continuous woods that once cov- 
