“All these birds are furnished with a very strong beak having hooked mandibles for dismembering their prey. Their claws are composed of four separate talons to each foot, three of these talons pointing forward and one backward. The talons are long, recurved, and grooved on the under side, the grooves having sharp edges that they may the better cut into flesh. The eagle’s bearing is bold, its looks stern, and its flight marvelously powerful. Eagles like to circle about in the air, to soar with scarcely a movement of the wings in the upper regions of the atmosphere beyond our view. Nevertheless, even from this immense height they can distinguish what is taking place on the earth’s surface below. They explore every farm with their piercing eyes and inspect every poultry-yard. Let a suitable prey show itself, and instantly the bird swoops down with whistling wing, faster than lead would fall. The unwary fowl is snatched from under the farmer’s very eyes. “Fortunately, the eagle, the chief of these bandits, is a very rare bird. In form it is large, measuring a meter and more from the tip of the beak to the tip of the tail, and it is covered with brown plumage. Its extended wings measure a span of nearly three meters. Its fierce eye, overshadowed by a very prominent eyebrow, glows with a somber fire. The eagle’s nest is known as its aery, and is flat instead of bowl-shaped like other birds’ nests. It is a sort of solid floor made of interwoven twigs and covered with a bed of rushes and heather. It is commonly placed on the face of some steep and forbidding precipice and between two rocks, the upper one of which overhangs and forms a kind of roof for the nest. The eggs, two in number—sometimes, though rarely, three—are of a dingy white spotted with red. The young eaglets are so greedy that at the time of their rearing the aery is strewn with bits of bleeding flesh. Some neighboring ledge of rock serves the parents as slaughter-house and cutting-up bench. It is there that the hares and rabbits, partridges and ducks, lambs and kids, seized in the plains and carried in rapid flight to the lofty heights where the eagle makes its home, are torn to pieces in order to be fed to the ever-hungry eaglets.” “Is the eagle really strong enough,” asked Emile, “to carry off a lamb like that? I had heard it, but couldn’t believe it.” “Nothing is less open to doubt,” his uncle assured him. “It would carry you off if it found you alone in the mountains.” “I could defend myself with a stick.” “Possibly; but let me tell you an incident, one of many to be found in the pages of an author whose word we may believe.