Lift the front of the trap; place the forked stick in an upright position against the outside of the front, and also outside the hoop. Insert one end of pliant twig between fork and front, and after raising hoop about two inches, insert the other end of the twig, so as to rest against the hoop, and press outwards. This will hold the hoop up. A bird, on approaching the trap, hops on the hoop to get at the grain within it, when the hoop will go down with the weight and let go the twig, which being pliant flies out, and the fork (being only outside the front) of course falls, and so does the trap.
BIRD-BOLTS.
The “bird bolts” mentioned by Shakespeare in Twelfth Night (Act i. Sc. 5), Love’s Labour’s Lost (Act iv. Sc. 3), and Much Ado about Nothing (Act i. Sc. 1), were the
“bolts,” or “quarrels” as they were sometimes called, which were shot from the cross-bow, or “stone-bow,” Twelfth Night (Act ii. Sc. 5). The latter was simply a cross-bow made for propelling stones or bullets, in contradistinction to a bow that shot arrows. Sir John Bramston, in his Autobiography (p. 108) says:—“Litle more than a yeare after I maried, I and my wife being at Skreenes with my father (the plague being soe in London, and my building not finished), I had exercised myself with a stone-bow, and a spar-hawke at the bush.”
There were two denominations of cross-bows—latches and prodds. The former were the military weapons, and were bent with one or both feet, by putting them into a kind of stirrup at the extremity, and then drawing the cord upward with the hands; the latter were chiefly used for sporting purposes. They were bent with the hand, by means of a small steel lever, called the goat’s-foot, on account of its being forked or cloven on the side that rested on the cross-bow and the cord. The bow itself was usually made of steel, though sometimes of wood or horn.[88]
The missiles discharged from them were not only arrows, which were shorter and stouter than those of the long-bow, but also bolts (bolzen, German; quarreaux, or carrieaux, French; quadrelli, Latin, corrupted into
“quarrels,” from their pyramidal form), and also stones or leaden balls.
Apropos of “bolts,” who does not remember Oberon’s poetical story of the wild pansy (Viola tricolor) marked by Cupid’s “bolt?”
“Yet mark’d I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,—