Nevertheless, as it is often difficult and sometimes impossible to find rabbits in open places, it is advisable to let the first flight for your beginner be as easy as you can. When she has taken an undersized rabbit or leveret, she may be advanced to a full-grown rabbit, and thence, after a few kills, to a full-grown hare, if your ambition is to fly hares. Very possibly it may be necessary to throw her off at the quarry and not expect her to start of her own accord. She may also refuse more than once, and yet be in the mind--that capricious and wayward mind of hers--to fly. I have seen a young goshawk, only just trained, taken out and thrown off at three or four hares in inviting places, and have seen her refuse them all; and yet, ten minutes later, I have seen her go at one like a whirlwind, and have it down and helpless within sixty yards from the start. The flight at hares rather overtaxes the powers of any except the strongest female goshawks; and many people think that the flight at rabbits is preferable, even in the quality of sport afforded. In fact, the difference between the two is not so much one of speed as of brute strength; and in quickness the rabbit will be found generally superior. A goshawk which will take hares is the more valuable; but it is doubtful if she shows any better sport. Gaiety Girl, whose portrait is given, changed hands at £20, and was well worth the money. This hawk, trained by Mr. A. Newall on Salisbury Plain, killed no less than fifty-five hares in one season, besides other quarry. Of course if goshawks are to be flown at hares, they must be left strictly to this quarry as far as possible, and not encouraged to ever look at a rabbit. The goshawk has one great advantage over her nobler cousin, the peregrine; she need not necessarily stop when her quarry has gone into covert. Provided only that the covert is thin enough for her to see the quarry, and to get along, she will stick to him there as pertinaciously as in the open. She will naturally not be so likely to succeed; trees and bushes will impede her stoops, and give the quarry a far better chance of doubling out of the way. But it is astonishing how clever even an eyess goshawk can be in threading her way through covert, and choosing the moment when a dash can be made. The hare is not as well able to use her natural cunning in front of a hawk as in front of a hound. The whole affair is so rapid, and the danger behind is so pressing, that there is hardly time to devise, and still less to put in practice, those tricks which are so successful in hare-hunting. If one could only see it all, possibly the flight at a hare in a thin covert would be better worth seeing than a flight in the open. At any rate, the skill exhibited by the hawk must be greater. For she not only has to keep the quarry in view, and to make straight shots at him, but also in doing so to avoid breaking her wing tips, or even her neck, against an intervening tree.