the air. Two of the birds were in pursuit of the third, and rose
alternately to rush upon and strike at their victim from above. They
were coming down from a considerable height, and at last were directly
over the boys, not more than forty or fifty feet from the ground; and
the youngsters were amazed at their fury, the loud, rushing sound of
their wings, as of a torrent, and of their deep, hoarse croaks and
savage, barking cries. Then they began to rise again, the hunted bird
trying to keep above his enemies, they in their turn striving to rise
higher still so as to rush down upon him from overhead; and in this way
they towered higher and higher, their barking cries coming fainter and
fainter back to earth, until the boys, not to lose sight of them, cast
themselves down flat on their backs, and, continuing to gaze up, saw
them at last no bigger than three "leetle blackbirds." Then they
vanished; but the boys, still lying on their backs, kept their eyes
fixed on the same spot, and by and by first one black speck reappeared,
then a second, and they soon saw that two birds were swiftly coming down
to earth. They fell swiftly and silently, and finally pitched upon the
down not more than a couple of hundred yards from the boys. The hunted
bird had evidently succeeded in throwing them off and escaping. Probably
it was one of their own young, for the ravens' habit is when their young
are fully grown to hunt them out of the neighbourhood, or, when they
cannot drive them off, to kill them.

There is no doubt that the carrion did attract ravens in numbers to this
part of Wiltshire, but it is a fact that up to that date--about
1830--the bird had many well-known, old breeding-places in the county.
The Rev. A. C. Smith, in his "Birds of Wiltshire," names twenty-three
breeding-places, no fewer than nine of them on Salisbury Plain; but at
the date of the publication of his work, 1887, only three of all these
nesting-places were still in use: South Tidworth, Wilton Park, and