AND AMERICAN RURAL SPORTS. 
201 
wing will strike a man dead to the ground. Even when 
they are absent, an attack on their brood is far from safe, 
as they see so far, and can come so rapidly. An Irish 
peasant had discovered the eyrie of a pair of Eagles on one 
of the islands in the Lake of Killarney; and watching the 
absence of the parents, he swam to the island, climbed the 
rocks, made prize of the Eaglets, and dashing into the lake, 
made for the shore; but before he had reached it, and while 
only his head was above water, the Eagles came, killed him 
on the spot, and bore off their rescued broQd in triumph. 
In the northern islands, where cormorants, gulls, and other 
aquatic birds breed in immense numbers, the Eagles com- 
mit terrible devastation among the young; though in these 
places the Sea Eagle is often mistaken for the Golden 
Eagle. They also attack full-grown deer, and even foxes, 
wolves, and bears; they generally fasten on the heads of 
the larger quadrupeds, tear out their eyes, and then beat 
them to death with their wings. 
There are accounts of their carrying off infants in Britain; 
and in places farther to the north, they have carried off 
children a little more advanced. Instances of this are 
mentioned in Iceland, in the Faroe islands, and in Nor- 
way. In the parish of Nooder-hangs in the last country, 
a boy two years of age was carried off in 1737, though his 
parents were close at hand, and made all the exertions in 
their power to scare the spoiler; nor were they able to 
follow her to the place of her retreat. In Tinkalen (Faroe 
islands) a child was carried off, and the mother climbed the 
hitherto unascended precipice, but the child was dead. 
Ray mentions a case in the Orkneys, where the mother 
was more fortunate; and it probably is the foundation of 
the following tale, which appeared in Blackwood’s Maga- 
zine for November, 1826, and which bears the exquisitely 
graphic stamp of Professor Wilson. 
The Story of Hannah Lamond. — “Almost all the peo- 
ple in the parish were leading in their meadow-hay on the 
same day of Midsummer, so drying was the sunshine and 
the wind, — and huge heaped-up wains, that almost hid from 
view the horses that drew them along the sward, beginning 
to get green with second growth, were moving in all di- 
rections towards the snug farm-yards. Never had the 
parish seemed before so populous. Jocund w 7 as the balmy 
air with laughter, whistle, and song. But the treegnomens 
threw the shadow of ‘ one o’clock’ on the green dial-face 
of the earth — the horses were unyoked, and took instantly 
to grazing — groups of men, women, lads, lasses, and chil- 
dren, collected under grove and bush, and hedge-row, — 
graces were pronounced, and the great Being who gave 
them that day their daily bread, looked down from his 
eternal throne, well-pleased with the piety of his thankful 
creatures. The great Golden Eagle, the pride and the pest 
3 E 
of the parish, stooped down, and away with something in 
his talons. One single, sudden female shriek — and then 
shouts and outcries as if a church-spire had tumbled down 
on a congregation at a sacrament! ‘ Hannah Lamond’s 
bairn! Hannah Lamond’s bairn!’ was the loud, fast spread- 
ing cry. ‘The Eagles ta’en aff Hannah Lamond’s bairn!’ 
and many hundred feet were in another instant hurrying 
towards the mountain. Two miles of hill, and dale, and 
copse, and shingle, and many intersecting brooks lay be- 
tween; but in an incredibly short time, the foot of the 
mountain was alive with people. The eyrie was well- 
known, and both old birds were visible on the rock-ledge. 
But who shall scale that dizzy cliff, which Mark Steuart the 
sailor, who had been at the storming of many a fort, at- 
tempted in vain? All kept gazing, weeping, wringing of 
hands in vain, rooted to the ground, or running back and 
forwards, like so many ants essaying their new wings in 
discomfiture. ‘ What’s the use — what’s the use o’ ony puir 
human means? We have no power but in prayer!’ and 
many knelt down — fathers and mothers, thinking of their 
own babies, as if they would force the deaf heavens to hear! 
“Hannah Lamond had all this while been sitting on a 
rock, with a face perfectly white, and eyes like those of a 
mad person, fixed on the eyrie. Nobody had noticed her; 
for strong as all sympathies with her had been at the swoop 
of the Eagle, they were now swallowed up in the agony of 
eyesight. ‘Only last Sabbath was my sweet wee wean 
baptized:’ and on uttering these words, she flew off through 
the brakes and over the huge stones, up — up — up — faster 
than ever huntsman ran in to the death, — fearless as a goat 
playing among precipices. No one doubted, no one could 
doubt, that she would soon be dashed to pieces. But have 
not people who walk in their sleep, obedient to the myste- 
rious guidance of dreams, clomb the walls of old ruins, and 
found footing, even in decrepitude, along the edge of un- 
guarded battlements and down dilapidated staircases, deep 
as draw-wells or coal-pits, and returned with open, fixed, 
and unseeing eyes, unharmed to their beds, at midnight? 
It is all the work of the soul, to whom the body is a slave; 
and shall not the agony of a mother’s passion — who sees her 
baby, whose warm mouth has just left her breast, hurried 
off by a demon to a hideous death — bear her limbs aloft 
wherever there is dust to dust, till she reach that devour- 
ing den, and fiercer and more furious far, in the passion of 
love, than any bird of prey that ever bathed its beak in 
blood, throttle the fiends, that with their heavy wings, 
would fain flap her down the cliffs, and hold up her child 
in deliverance before the eye of the all-seeing God? 
“No stop — no stay — she knew not that she drew her 
breath. Beneath her feet Providence fastened every loose 
stone, and to her hands strengthened every root. How 
