THE prentice lads woke up the echoes on a summer's eve with buckler-play in the cheap, and the stocks and the pillory were set up in every parish; when swaggerers paraded in Paul's Walk with well-brushed finery, and cudgelled their brains to devise a new pourpoint; when gallant swashbucklers emptied their pottlepots in the pleasant ville of Southwark, and cheered and shouted when old Bruin broke his chain and played havoc among the curs of the bear-garden-and traitor's heads were on the bridge-gate blackening and rotting in the sun; when the outlaws of merry Sherwood "Ne is there hawk which mantleth her on pearch, Whether high towering, or accoasting low, But I the measure of her flight do search, And all her prey, and all her diet know." It is well sometimes to think of these things. To leave the present and live with the pastto forget our railroads and steam navigation-indulged in plundering predictions undisour straight brick houses our well-lighted, well-paved, well-guarded thoroughfares-our manufactories, museums, libraries, cheap books and newspapers, mechanics' institutes, and the rest of it-and to glance at the things that have been, to know how men in England fared centuries agone, what they did, and how they did it, in the good old times. Famous old times! when this good city of London was a picturesque old place, with curious gables and projecting stories, and dark, narrow streets where the plague lurked; when mayed by the smell of hemp; when gallant knights tilted at the tournaments, and very often lost their lives; when artisans were impressed by royal command to build Windsor Castle, and all the hedges and fences near the king's forest were ordered to be removed, in order that his deer might have more ready access to the fields of pasture. Learned old times! when a man escaped hanging if he knew how to read; and Wickliffe says, "there were many unable curates. who could not read the ten commandments." It was in those old times that hawking was a favourite diversion and principal amusement of the English. Then a person of rank scarcely stirred out without his hawk on his hand; and in old paintings this is the criterion of nobility. Harold, afterwards king of England, when he went on a most important embassy into Normandy, is painted embarking with a bird on his hand and a dog under his arm; and in an ancient picture of the nuptials of Henry VI., a nobleman is represented in a similar manner. Every degree had its peculiar hawk, from an emperor down to a holy-water clerk. It was the pride of the rich, and the privilege of the poor. The falcons and hawks which were in use, are found to breed in Wales, in Scotland and its islands. The peregrine falcon inhabits the posed of silver for clearness of sound. The other end of the jesses were furnished each with a ring, which could be readily fitted upon the swivel, designed to connect them both with GOSHAWK. the leash, or long slender strap, sometimes prolonged by a creance, or common cord, and designed as a tether by which to restrain the bird, at the same time that it shall be allowed considerable room for free motion. The training of falcons was a wearying and laborious business. The sport, we need hardly say, was founded on the natural instinct of this rapacious order of birds. But to train them was no easy matter. The falconer's was a responsible office-you notice him in his quaintly-fashioned garb in old pictures-you read of him in old romances, how he was deep in the mysteries of his art, how the falcon proper and the gerfalcon, the short-winged hawk, the sparrowhawk, the goshawk, the tiercel, the tierce-gentle, and the musket, were to him familiar things; but, perhaps, it were impossible to find a better description of the falconer than that which is furnished by John It was a gallant sight to witness a hawking Stephens, who wrote in the days of King party ride forth to the sport, and to follow James I. "A falconer," he says, is the egg them and witness the bravery of the hawk and of a tame pullet hatched up among hawks and heron-if old writers are to be believed. The spaniels. He hath in his minority conversed noble horses gaily decorated, the picturesque with kestrels and young hobbies; but grow-costume of the time, the birds hooded and ing up he begins to handle the lure and plumed, the falconers and the dogs were all look a falcon in the face. All his learning worth looking at as they passed under the makes him but a new linguist; for to have gnarled branches of the wide-spreading trees studied and practised the terms of Hawk's to the broad" hawking downs." And the sport dictionary is enough to excuse his wit, manners, itself was exciting. When down by the river and humanity. He hath too many trades to the heron had been roused and flew upward to thrive; and yet if he had fewer he would thrive the sky, and the falcon unleashed, and unless. Hawks be his admiration, his know- hooded, was whistled off, and flew as if she ledge, his labour, his object, his all." never would have turned head again. Higher and higher the birds rise till they seem no bigger than sparrows, each ascending in spiral gyrations, each trying to make the wind his friend, the falcon striving to gain the ascendant that with one fell swoop he may come down upon his prey. It was not uncommon to release two hawks. These circlings, then, had the curious effect of presenting the three birds as apparently flying in different directions; whereas, the real intention of the two hawks was steadily directed to one point-that of contact with the heron, whose entire efforts were to rise higher than the hawks, or to receive their swoop upon its sharp bill. Presently, the final swoop is made; heron and hawks descend together, but not with a dangerous rapidity the action of their wings breaking their fall, and now the whole party of falconers are in quick pursuit, to the assistance of the hawks against the final struggle of the heron. Vast was the expense which attended the sport. In the early part of the seventeenth century Sir Thomas Monson gave a thousand pounds for a cast of hawks. This accounts, in some degree, for the severity of the laws which were enacted for their preservation. Falconry is sport of the past, and yet it must ever remain a living thing amongst us. Our literature abounds with references to the pastime, and many of its terms are incorporated into our common language. Milton'speaks of imping his wing to a bolder flight, and Shakspeare makes Macduff frantically inquire, when he hears that his children are slain وو "What! all my pretty ones-all At one fell swoop?" To "hoodwink" and to fly at higher game are common terms. These, and a thousand others, scattered through old books, and uttered in our daily talk, will ever keep alive the memory of falconry. The Grand Falconer of France had the superintendence of all the king's falcons, and was a sworn officer with wages and allowances amounting to £22,200 a year. All hawk merchants, both French and foreigners, were bound under pain of confiscation of their birds, to come and present them to the grand falconer, for him to choose birds for the king before they were allowed to sell to any one else. In the reign of Louis XIV., if his majesty, when hawking, inclined to the pleasure of letting fly a hawk, the grand falconer placed it on the king's fist; and when the prey was taken, the pricker gave the head of it to his chief, and he to the grand falconer, who presented it to the king. The Duke of St. Albans is the hereditary grand falconer of the British Crown. The old books upon hawking are written with great vivacity and spirit, and abound more in gentle description and pleasant anecdote than any other treatises upon field sports. "Uncle," says Master Stephen, in "Every Man in his Humour," "afore I go in, can you tell me if Edward have ere a book of the sciences of hawking and hunting? I have bought me a hawk, and a hood and bells and all, and lack nothing but a book to keep them by." And when Old Knowall angrily replies, "Oh, most ridiculous!" he rejoins, Nay, look you now, you are angry, uncle; why, you know, an' a man have not skill in the hawking and hunting languages, I'll not give a rush for him. They are more studied than the Greek or the Latin." And so they were studied with wonderful care by all those who strove to be thought gentlemen. In a play first acted in 1604, the following passage occurs, highly descriptive of the sport:"Sir Charles. So; well cast off; aloft, aloft; well flown. O now she rakes her at the sowse, and strikes her down Now she hath seized the fowl, and 'gins to plume her, Sir Charles. Ay, but 'twas at the querre,* Such then was the " good old sport of falconry." During the whole of the day the gentry were given to the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field; and in the evening celebrated their exploits with the most abandoned sottishness; and the labouring population of the kingdom were liable to capital punishment, to fines, and imprisonment, for destroying this most destructive of the feathered tribes. Those days are gone, and glad are we they are gone. If such a condition as that which we have just mentioned was the state of "merry England in the "good old times," and all history says it was so, we rejoice that the good old times are past; for, admitting that those old times were good, we have still the degrees of comparison to fall back upon; the positive good old times, the comparative better old times, the superlative best old times,-for, by the bright light resting on the future, the best old times are coming yet. W. M. F. * When a hawk went covertly under the hedges and seized a bird by the river, it was said the bird was taken unfairly, or killed at the querre. MOTHER EARTH. NO. VI. THE CARE GOD TAKES OF HER. IF you have ever been searching for one thing and found another, or ever performed a journey to a certain spot, and noticed as you went, that the side lanes led to very pleasant places, you will understand my meaning in the following sentences. I was writing a paper on Mother Earth's relatives, and another on Mother Earth's dresses, when I noticed the wonderful manner in which her safety and welfare are provided for. I was not looking for this, mind you; it came in my way. But I am not the man, when a treasure lies at my feet, to kick it into the road; and on the occasion referred to, I picked it up and said, That will do for my boys! You must not understand from this that I claim all the glory of first finding it on the contrary, most of it was pointed out to me by others, for as I told you six months ago, when I am hunting up information for my boys, I travel in company with Sir Charles Lyell, Professor Whewell, Dr. Prout, Sir John Herschell, and all the great philosophers of the day. I explained in a previous paper, that the paths taken by Mother Earth and her sisters in travelling round the sun do in no way interfere with one another, but lie one within another like a number of hoops, or like the painted circles on a target. The Earth's path is nearly a circle, the path of Venus more nearly so, and the paths of the other planets are not much out. Now the paths might have been ovals, very narrow and very long, or some narrow and some wide in all degrees, and they might have crossed and interfered in the most confused manner. The confusion, too, might have been dangerous: world striking against world might have thrown the oceans from their beds, dragged down moons from heaven, shattered continents, and destroyed all living creatures. The present peace and quietness are owing to the orderly motion of the planets in paths which do not cross. Again, if the Earth moved in a very long oval, since the focus would be near the end, and the sun would be in the focus, there would be such a difference between the summer heat and the winter cold, that no creatures such as live on earth now could possibly exist. Only a circular path, or a path nearly circular, could give us the seasons as we now have them. How wonderful, then, that the very path which serves to keep things orderly and safe should be the one chosen for the Earth to travel in. I say, that God has chosen it, for it could hardly be the result of chance; accidents don't happen in that neat and orderly way. There are ten thousand other paths the Earth might have taken, but most of them would have ended in mischief; and it is truly said, that it would be much easier to believe that a target, such as archers shoot at, was painted in circles by the accidental dashes of a brush in the hands of a blind man, than that the paths of the planets were not chosen and arranged. Then, too, what a wise contrivance, to place the large body in the focus, and make a sun of it, to give light and heat to all the others. It might have been that there should be no light at all; the little bodies moving around the larger one, but everything dark, everything cold, no summer-time, no daylight. It might have been that one of the little bodies should be the sun, giving forth light as it moved round the large body in the middle; but then the light would reach us in a very irregular fashion, and all living things would find it inconvenient. The best arrangement is, that the sun should be in the centre, and there the sun is "the candle placed upon the candlestick, the fire lighted on the hearth, for the comfort of all the family." I have spoken of the flowers which beautify the earth, and of the trees which clothe its surface. If we examine a flower or a tree, we shall find it to be a wonderful thing; and the greater the power of our magnifying-glass the more shall we see to admire. There are cells and canals, fibres and veins, juices and gums, vessels for the sap to rise in, pores in the leaves to take in moisture, starch and sugar, seedvessels and seeds. In fact, every plant and every flower is a curious machine-a sort of clockwork going through its motions. This clockwork is so set as to go for a year. If the summer and autumn were much shorter than they are, fruits would not ripen on the trees; if they were much longer, the trees would blossom a second time, and the blossoms be cut down by the winter. A long year without a winter would give the trees no rest. Plants have regular times for putting forth their leaves and flowers; and by watching them you may know what month of the year it is without looking at your almanack. The honeysuckle puts forth its leaves in January, gooseberry-bushes and currant-trees in February, or early in March, willow-trees and elm-trees in April, oak-trees and ash-trees in May. In February appears the flower of the snowdrop; in March that of the primrose; the cowslip comes in April. In May and June the flowers crowd one another; in August and September they are plentiful; in October comes the meadow saffron, and a few even bloom in winter. Now all this is as regular as clockwork. The tree that blossomed in April last year blossoms in April this year; the plants on the Alps, without waiting for the sun's heat, struggle their way through the snow at the appointed time; fruit-trees taken from this country to another, flourish for some years at the period of our spring, though it may be winter in the land they are transplanted to. So it appears that the clockwork of flowers is wound up to go for a year, and if the year were longer or shorter than it is, their machinery would be disordered-they would grow sick and die. Now the year might very easily have been made longer or shorter. The earth is about ninety-five millions of miles from the sun. If it were nearer, the year would be shorter; if it were further off, the year would be longer: twelve millions of miles either way would make a month's difference. Put the earth where Venus is, and it would go round the sun, in seven months; put it where Mars is, and there would be twenty-three months to the year. Make the sun larger or smaller, and the length of the year would be changed; but, as any change would throw all the plants into disorder, how wise it was to fit one thing to another, and make the clockwork to go for a year exactly, and the year to be of just such a length as it is! If we take the day instead of the year we shall find that its length suits the plants very well. Linnæus, the great Swedish naturalist, proposed to make a Dial of Flora, or FlowerClock, by means of plants which open and close their flowers at certain hours of the day. At five in the morning the day-lily opens; at five or six o'clock the dandelion; at seven the hawkweed; at nine the marigold; and the hours for closing in the evening are equally regular. This is not altogether owing to the action of the sun's light; for when Decandolle, a famous botanist, kept certain plants in a dark cellar warmed by a stove, and others in a cellar lighted by lamps, some of them still opened and closed at their accustomed hours. If you bring plants from the tropics, where the day is twelve hours in length, they will suffer through the length of our summer daylight, and require to be shaded a part of the time. It seems, then, that plants and flowers have a machinery set so as to go for twenty-four hours as well as one set for a year. If we consider the animal world, the same thing appears. Cows, sheep, sparrows, &c., feed by day; owls and bats in the twilight; lions, hyenas, aquatic birds, and other creatures, by night. Those that feed in the day sleep at night, those that feed in the twilight sleep partly in the night, partly in the day. The thing to notice is that they all manage to eat and drink, to labour and to rest, regularly every twenty-four hours. Man, also, in every country, from China to Peru, goes to bed, or at least goes to sleep once in twenty-four hours. Some may sleep eight hours, some six, and some may be content with four or five; but nobody sits up for a week, nobody goes to sleep for a month; they all go to rest once in twenty-four hours. And this is not because it is most convenient or most natural to wake and work in the day light, and sleep in the darkness, but because man is a machine that needs a daily rest-he is not wound up to go longer without injury to himself; for the people of Lapland can't sleep through all the two or three months the sun is absent from them, nor can they do without sleep throughout the long period of his constant shining. In some of the Arctic voyages, where the ships got so far north that the sun did not rise for three months, the men were made to retire at nine and rise at a quarter to six, and this was found to be best for their health. Altogether, then, considering the machinery of man's body, of the bodies of the lower animals, and of the structures of trees and flowers, it seems the best thing possible that the day should be just so long as it is. And yet, if things had been deft to chance, how easily might the earth have twirled a little faster on her axis and made the day shorter, or moved a little more sluggishly and made it longer! Mercury spins round in one day and five minutes, Venus in twenty-three hours and twenty-one minutes, Mars in one day and thirty-nine minutes, Jupiter in nine hours and fifty-five minutes, Saturn in ten hours and twenty-nine minutes, so that there seems no necessity for the earth to keep to twenty-four hours, only it is the best arrangement, and for that reason God has so ordered it. Did you know that some people are colour blind? They can distinguish the shapes of things, and can tell very dark shades from very light ones; but they can't tell green from red, or blue from orange. They will paint pictures and give every object its wrong colour, trees with leaves and blossoms all black, houses bright vermilion, rooms with the furniture all blue, spaniel dogs with green ears and tail, and other things equally funny. Poor people, they are to be pitied. True, they can perform most of the duties of life, but they are deprived of a thousand pleasures. They see no gaudy plumage of birds, no shining scales of fishes, no glittering wings of insects. The flowers are all without colour to them, the trees have no variety of green; the sun may rise, the sun may set, but they observe no calm sweet blue overhead, no silver streaks in the east, no golden tints in the west. Our eyes are not like theirs, yet with our eyes quite perfect we might have been just as badly off. There might have been no light, or there might have been light without variety. Colours are agreeable, colours are delightful, but they are not absolutely necessary; we could have got through life without rainbows, and flowers, and pretty butterflies. In the polar regions most things are as white as the snow; in dark cellars plants and animals lose their colours and become white. All things might have been white, all things might have been black; but the Almighty has ordered it otherwise, and for at least three seasons out of four, Mother Earth is gay with many colours. In the remaining season, when snow lies on the ground, Dr. Prout shows us that there is still much to admire. Suppose for instance that snow had been black; then the polar regions, which get very little light and heat as it is, would get less still-in fact, would be almost dark and exceedingly cold; for black things absorb the light and heat which fall upon them, while white things reflect the rays and scatter them about. The heat which entered into the black snow would soon melt it, and we should be constantly liable to floods. If this had been the case no creatures could have lived in the north; as it is, all goes well. Then, if in our own land, and in lands further south, things had been for the most part white, the excessive heat and the glare of light would have made it impossible for us to live. You have noticed that in the winter, when Mother Earth is visited with frost and snow, the ice forms on the surface of the water, and the snow when it melts, melt gradually. If rivers, and lakes, and seas were frozen to the bottom it would be next to impossible to get them thawed again; and if the snow on the mountains, on the houses, and in the streets thawed into water suddenly, in a moment, we should have disastrous inundations. It is |