th all kinds of birds of prey.
On these he and Master Simon have exhausted their patience and
ingenuity, endeavouring to "reclaim" them, as it is termed, and to train
them up for the sport; but they have met with continual checks and
disappointments. Their feathered school has turned out the most
intractable and graceless scholars; nor is it the least of their trouble
to drill the retainers who were to act as ushers under them, and to take
immediate charge of these refractory birds. Old Christy and the
gamekeeper both, for a time, set their faces against the whole plan of
education; Christy having been nettled at hearing what he terms a
wild-goose chase put on a par with a fox-hunt; and the gamekeeper having
always been accustomed to look upon hawks as arrant poachers, which it
was his duty to shoot down, and nail, _in terrorem_, against the
out-houses.

Christy has at length taken the matter in hand, but has done still more
mischief by his intermeddling. He is as positive and wrongheaded about
this as he is about hunting. Master Simon has continual disputes with
him as to feeding and training the hawks. He reads to him long passages
from the old authors I have mentioned; but Christy, who cannot read, has
a sovereign contempt for all book-knowledge, and persists in treating
the hawks according to his own notions, which are drawn from his
experience, in younger days, in rearing of game cocks.

[Illustration: Physicking the Hawks]

The consequence is, that, between these jarring systems, the poor birds
have had a most trying and unhappy time of it. Many have fallen victims
to Christy's feeding and Master Simon's physicking; for the latter has
gone to work _secundum artem_, and has given them all the vomitings and
scourings laid down in the books; never were poor hawks so fed and
physicked before. Others have been lost by being but half "reclaimed,"
or tamed; for on being taken into the field, they have "raked," after
the game quite out of hearing of the call, and never returned to school.

All these disappointments had been petty, yet sore grievances to the
squire, and had made him to despond about success. He has lately,
however, been made happy by the receipt of a fine Welsh falcon, which
Master Simon terms a stately highflyer. It is a present from the
squire's friend, Sir Watkyn Williams Wynn; and is, no doubt, a
descendant of some ancient line of Welsh princes of the air, that have
long lorded it over their kingdo