the nasty bits no one else will have. In the cases
beyond there are graceful swans and chubby ducks and flamingoes, birds
whose long pink legs make them look as if they stood on painted stilts,
and who have beautiful rose-coloured edges to their white wings. At the
very end of the gallery there are two huge cases as big as the side of
an ordinary room, and it is well to sit down here and look at them, for
both are full of interest. In part of one the space is taken up with a
great cliff, in which is the home of the golden eagle, wildest and most
untameable of all eagles. He lives far up on lonely mountain heights,
where the air is cold and pure. His great wings sail over vast dark
chasms, where men have sometimes lost their lives. His eye sees an
extraordinary distance, and his flight is very swift. He chooses for his
home a cave or natural hole on the face of a high cliff; this is called
the eyrie, and here he gathers together sticks, and odds and ends to
make a kind of bedding for his young. When the little eaglets are young
they are just like balls of white cotton-wool, with streaks of black
here and there, all fluff and down, like those you see here. The mother
and father birds go sailing high up in the sky, and suddenly they
descend with a swift dive and pounce on some tiny lamb who has strayed
from his mother's side, and perhaps fallen over the edge of a cliff and
cannot get back again. He has been bleating loudly to call his mother to
him, for he is too little to know he may attract enemies as well as
friends; and his cries have been heard by the eagle, who comes down like
an avalanche, and, seizing him firmly in its great talons, carries him
away higher and higher to the nest in the cliff. Then there is a whirr
and swoop, and the mother or father eagle, whichever it is, alights on
the rough platform in the cliff and lays the still warm and only
half-dead woolly lamb before the young ones. There is not much chance
for it then, but let us hope it has been stunned and made unconscious
long before this by its swift whirling voyage through the air. Eagles
catch rabbits, too, and anything they can find. In one nest there were
found the remains of nine grouse, four hares, part of a lamb, and many
other things. Here in the eagles' nest in the gallery you can see a
half-eaten rabbit's leg hanging out over the edge, and other nasty
remains.

Crossing over to the big case on the other side, we see another cliff,
bare and