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These pits led us into other rooms, from which opened out other corridors embellished in the same bizarre manner with sparrow-hawks, serpents coiled in circles, the symbolic tau, pedum, and baris, prodigious works which no living eye should ever see, interminable legends in granite which only the dead throughout eternity have time to read.
The parched tops of the palms, where turtle doves, lapwings and sparrow-hawks were wont to perch, were crowded with the vagabond boys of the town, who whiled away the time by pulling the withered and diseased dates from the great clumps and flinging them down on the bystanders below, till the guard took aim at them with their arrows and stopped the game.
Ay, ay pluck them, plume them and then the larded capons will not be for flying so high a wing, my lord, among the goss- hawks and sparrow-hawks, and the like." And, therewithal, Sir Mungo fixed on Nigel his quick, sharp, grey eye, watching the effect of his sarcasm as keenly as the surgeon, in a delicate operation, remarks the progress of his anatomical scalpel.
The parched tops of the palms, where turtle doves, lapwings and sparrow-hawks were wont to perch, were crowded with the vagabond boys of the town, who whiled away the time by pulling the withered and diseased dates from the great clumps and flinging them down on the bystanders below, till the guard took aim at them with their arrows and stopped the game.
Has De Brantès announced the speedy arrival of my sparrow-hawks?" "Of one only, Sire; the smaller of the two died under his training." "Ah!" exclaimed the King, with great petulance; "it is always so. Whatever is destined to give me pleasure fails when I am the most eager to possess it."
On the miserable pittance of the elder brother the three young adventurers, nevertheless, contrived with considerable difficulty to exist, although it was notorious that they had but one cloak, at that period an indispensable article of costume, among them; a circumstance by which two were compelled to avoid observation while the third fulfilled his duties; and so little, moreover, were their services valued by M. de Lude that he was in the habit of declaring that they were fit for nothing but "to catch green jays," a reproach which they owed to their skill in training sparrow-hawks to catch small birds; and to which he was far from supposing when he gave it utterance that they would ultimately be indebted for a prosperity almost fabulous.
Two sparrow-hawks sat huddled up over the door of the cave, out of which came the sharp odor of burning juniper-berries; this was intended to render the various emanations rising from the different strange substances, which were collected and preserved there, innocuous. As Paaker approached the cavern the old woman called out to some one within: "Is the wax cooking?"
“Tudhoe has no river, a misfortune ‘valde deflendus.’ In other respects the vicinity was charming; and it afforded an ample supply of woods and hedgerow trees to insure a sufficient stock of carrion crows, jackdaws, jays, magpies, brown owls, kestrels, merlins, and sparrow-hawks, for the benefit of natural history and my own instruction and amusement.”
Occasionally, however, this southern migration during the winter seems to be doubted, as a clerical friend of mine once told me that a brother clergyman, a well educated and even a learned man, told him, when talking about Cuckoos and what became of them in winter, that "it was a mistake to suppose they migrated, but that they all turned into Sparrow-hawks in the winter."
Joanna rose instantly to cross the street and intercept him; and she recoiled in the nick of time to save herself from being ridden down. At a sign from the fat Hindoo the eight horsemen spurred, and swooped up-street with the speed and certainty of sparrow-hawks and the noise of devastation.
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