THE EAGLE. 
97 
A more fortunate fate awaited a child in the Isle of Skye, 
in Scotland, where a woman having left it in the field for a 
short time, an Eagle carried it off in his talons across a 
lake, and there deposited his burden. Some people herding 
sheep perceived it, and hearing the infant cry, hurried to 
the spot and found it uninjured. The name of the child 
was Mel, hut he was afterwards distinguished and called by 
a Gaelic word, signifying Eagle. In Sweden a deplorable 
circumstance occurred to the mother of a child; she was 
working in the folds, and had laid her infant on the 
ground, at a little distance; soon after an Eagle darted 
down, and carried it off. For a considerable time the 
wretched woman heard the poor child screaming in the air, 
hut there was no help. She saw it no more; in a little 
time she lost her reason, and is, we believe, still living, 
confined in the lunatic asylum of the town near which it 
happened. 
An instance, it is said, occurred in the spring of 1847, 
of an Eagle carrying off a hoy of ten years of age, in the 
Commune of Hery sur Alby, in the Canton of Geneva. 
The little fellow had just rifled a nest, from which he had 
taken the young Eaglets, thereby probably irritating the 
old birds, and more powerfully exciting them; for he was 
immediately seized by one of them, and deposited on the 
summit of a rock about 600 yards above the spot from 
which he was raised ; and luckily before any further violence 
was offered, he was rescued by some shepherds who were 
engaged at no great distance. He had sustained no other 
injury than a rather severe laceration from the Eagle’s 
claws. 
On Tirst Holm, one of the Feroe Islands, situated between 
the north of Scotland and Iceland, a similar fact occurred ; 
an Eagle caught up an infant lying at a little distance from 
its mother, and carried it to its nest, situated on a point of 
high rock, so steep that the boldest bird-catchers had never 
ventured to attempt to climb it ; the mother, however, as- 
cended and reached the nest, hut alas ! too late : the child 
was dead, and its eyes torn out. But the most striking story 
H 
