"No, sir, I haven't; but I have a notion that two or three years ago I saw two or three of their eggs in a cottage somewhere over yonder."
Great Bustard.
He pointed to the western sky, but to the boys' eyes no cottages were visible; and upon their asking him for further information, he told them that beyond a ridge of trees which crested a warren were some half-dozen cottages, and he thought it was in one of those that he had seen bustards' eggs, but he was not at all sure.
"What is the meaning of this?" asked Dick, pointing to the mouth of a rabbit-hole which was barred in with sticks like a cage. Inside the sticks were the feathers and part of the skeleton of a stock-dove.
The warrener replied,—
"The doves breed in the rabbit-holes, and we warreners keep a 'dowe' dog, which will tell us at once what holes have nests in them; and then, when the young ones are almost ready to fly, we fasten them in the burrow with sticks, just like that, and the old ones feed the young ones through the bars, and when the young ones are fit to eat we kill them. I suppose the man who fastened that burrow in forgot where it was, or the young one died before it was worth eating."
