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What drawer or tiring do you mean? said Gargantua. My breviary, said the monk, for just as the falconers, before they feed their hawks, do make them draw at a hen's leg to purge their brains of phlegm and sharpen them to a good appetite, so, by taking this merry little breviary in the morning, I scour all my lungs and am presently ready to drink.
The ladies had all collected at the open windows, to see the departure of the Percys; but Miss Georgiana Falconer could learn nothing from the manner in which the Count handed Caroline into the carriage. It did not appear even that he spoke to her. On his return, the Miss Falconers, and the Lady Arlingtons, were of course talking of those who had just left the house.
Perhaps a dozen horses stood tethered at the entrance to the little court, with a man or two to look after them, for the greater part of their riders were already within; and a continual coming and going of lads with dogs; falconers each with his cadge, or three-sided frame on which sat the hawks; a barking of hounds, a screaming of birds, a clatter of voices and footsteps in the court all this showed that the boy was none too early.
Falconer smiling through the whole, and keeping the secret, which every body knows: in short, my dear, 'tis not worth explaining to you but John Clay certainly hopes to complete the mortification of the Falconers by giving himself to you. Besides, you are in fashion. Too much has been said about him I'm tired of him.
I stood rapt. The two Falconers were at some distance before me, walking arm in arm. They stood and gazed likewise.
The Miss Falconers, following in the wake of nobility, seemed too much charmed with themselves, to see or know me till Lord Oldborough, though listening to the duke, espied me, and did me the honour to bow; then the misses put up their glasses to see who I could be, and they also smiled, and curtsied, and were delighted to see me.
She spoke of her father and mother's death, and how the nineteen of her years had been passed in the little fortified farm alone with her nurse Pelagie, Glemarec Rene the piqueur, and the four falconers, Raoul, Gaston, Hastur, and the Sieur Piriou Louis, who had served her father. She had never been outside the moorland never even had seen a human soul before, except the falconers and Pelagie.
"We come of a race," he wrote carelessly to his brother Louis, "who are somewhat bad managers in our young days, but when we grow older, we do better, like our late father: 'sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper et in secula seculorum'. My greatest difficulty," he adds, "as usual, is on account of the falconers."
They are followed by a vast train of attendants, guards, pages, grooms, falconers with hawks; and, in a picture by Gaudenzio Ferrari, we have the court-dwarf, and, in a picture by Titian, the court-fool, both indispensable appendages of royal state in those times.
In vain had one young nobleman after another, heir apparent after heir apparent, been invited, cherished, and flattered by Mrs. Falconer, had been constantly at her balls and concerts, had stood beside the harp and the piano-forte, had danced or flirted with the Miss Falconers, had been hung out at all public places as a pendant to one or other of the sisters.
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