IN THE NEW FOREST.

F you are a poet, or a painter, or a philosopher, or a sinner, or a Shaker, or a bee, or a butterfly, or a bird, or a viper, you cannot hope to dwell anywhere more comfortably than in the New Forest. There you will be quite at home. But if you are not to be classed under any one of these categories, I am by no means sure that you will find yourself in desirable quarters. The New Forest has its drawbacks, and you may feel discontented at Beaulieu, Brockenhurst, or Burley, even as Rasselas was ill at ease in the Happy Valley. Thus much I dare to conjecture in your regard, but it may be that I am no competent authority. My wrongs may have perverted my judgment, for even as I write I am smarting under the sense of accumulated personal grievances. I have not yet got over the coldness, not to say the heartlessness, of my reception at Lyndhurst Road. No flourish of trumpets, no beating of drums, no ringing of bells, no waving of banners signalised the pride of the people of Hampshire on finding me in their midst. The only voice of welcome that greeted me on my arrival issued from the lungs of a donkey browsing in a field hard by, who--bless his congenial heart!—hailed me with a brotherly bray as I walked out of the station. Alone and in profound silence had I to ascend that

awful, break-neck omnibus, the very thought whereof makes my bones ache in their sockets.

Then, again, when I looked at the inhabitants of the place, and observed their style of dress and what manner of men they were, a feeling of disappointment swept over my soul, nipping my hopes and blighting my aspirations, even as the withering winds of the desert ruin vegetation and spread desolation all around. (Permit me to remark, en passant, that I am indebted to my Lord Russell for this noble image.) Remembering to have seen the Foresters at the Crystal Palace, gorgeously arrayed in coats of Lincoln green, jack-boots, leathern belts, plumed hats, "and all that," as Bays says, I had hoped to find the denizens of the New Forest clad in like picturesque apparel. Moreover, I had figured them to myself as splendid fellows, of colossal frames, standing at the very lowest six foot two in their stockings. Judge, then, of my chagrin on finding them a frail, delicate-looking race, of hardly average stature, and wearing clothes which differ in no essential respect from those worn by the generality of English people, whether dwelling in town or country! Asked I of myself, "What doth it avail a man to be a Forester, if he may not dress as such, and go about even as I saw a Verderer at the Surrey Theatre once upon a time, with a sword by his side, a hawk ("property") upon his wrist, and an axe in his girdle?" I had at first serious intentions of going down to the Forest in that guise, and was only deterred from so doing by the observation of my landlady that the day of my departure from London was not the "Fifth of November."

But the sorest grievance of all remains to be told. I object to be followed about by a cow. Not that I dislike cows as a race, by no means.

On the contrary, I rather like them. Their odour is, to my thinking, peculiarly fragrant, and their lowing, if not very musical, is at all events much more so than the singing of some people I wot of, the braying of a brass-band, or the grinding of a barrel-organ, sounds which have often well-nigh bereft me of reason. Be it understood, then, once for all, that I have no antipathy to cows. Nor would I be thought so churlish as to resent the fond familiarities of any pet creature, from a woman to a canary. There is no man whom I envy so much as my friend Mulfeather, blessed as he is in the possession of an oyster which, as he solemnly assures me, follows him about like a child. Some people might find it hard to swallow that oyster; but I don't, for Mulfeather is a Plymouth Brother, and—whatever he might do in his own interests-would not tell a lie (nor do anything else) to save a fellow-creature from drowning. But I protest against being persecuted by the attentions of any living thing whatsoever, and most of all by those of a cow, a respectable animal doubtless, but somewhat "lourde" and ungraceful, and therefore all the more likely to attract 'censorious notice, both towards herself and her companion. Yet go where I may, such would seem to be my unlucky destiny. It was but the other day, at Harrogate, that a cow dodged me up and down Montpelier Parade and round about the Stray" for the best part of two hours. And as

I was sauntering pensively over Emery Downs in this Forest of perennial novelty, no longer ago than last Wednesday, whom should I meet but another cow, and a 66 dun" cow, of all cows in the world, as if I had not "duns" enough already to pester me; and such a fancy did the creature take to me that, instantly changing her course, she

turned back, and walked meekly in my track all the way from Emery to Mark Ash, and thence to my lodgings at Lyndhurst. Now, this I call persecution. In vain did I alternately threaten and expostulate, in vain did I resort to soft words and hard stones. She clung to me like Poverty, and would not be cast off. The only reason that I can conjecture to account for my being thus systematically importuned by cows is that I have never been vaccinated. They want to torture me into vaccination, but they have mistaken their man. I had rather be torn asunder by wild horses or nibbled to death by ducks than vaccinated on compulsion. So the cows may as well give it up as a bad job. Such are the grievances to which I have been exposed ever since my arrival in the New Forest, and when I add that neither for love nor money can I get a glass of beer worth drinking, and that a gipsy woman told me last evening that I am fated to marry a large widow, who will insist upon taking me out to the West Indies next year, it will surely be admitted that my personal experiences may well disenchant me with the locality.

On the other hand, to anybody not doomed to run the gauntlet of such tribulations as have awaited me, the New Forest must be indeed a delightful place. George III., to be sure, poohpoohed it, declaring it to be "worse than any part of Bagshot Heath, and incomparably inferior to Windsor Forest." To which his host, Sir Harry Neale of Walhampton, ventured to reply that "it was fortunate in this, as in other matters of taste, that all did not think alike." But His Majesty made answer that, for his part, "he had no taste for what was called the fine, wild beauties of nature; he did not like mountains and other

romantic scenes, of which he sometimes heard much." This confession was worthy of the royal speaker, the rather that there is nothing resembling a mountain in the Forest, and that as for mountains generally, for which he professed such an aversion, it is a fact, capable of historic demonstration, that the dear old noodle never laid eyes on one in his life. The Forest has neither lofty hills nor deep valleys, and it is remarkably free from rivers properly so called, its streams for the most part being mere rivulets. Yet it is a most delightful place. A sympathetic survey of the Forest, in its varied beauties of leafy glen, verdant grove, sunny glade, and all the multiform phases of brilliant and affluent vegetation, provokes a contrast between William the Conqueror and Buggins the builder, anything rather than favourable to the latter gentleman. William undoubtedly carried things with a high hand, but then he was the champion of Nature, and for the assertion of her rights and the vindication of her supremacy undertook the most arduous achievements, which he executed with ruthless determination. Revolutions are not made with rose-water-no more are forests. William razed castles and churches to the earth, and laid towns and villages prostrate in the dust; and his son Rufus, he of the lively auburn locks, did the same, in order that, eight hundred years afterwards, Englishmen and Englishwomen might be free, as they now are, to roam through sylvan solitudes, and amid moors, heaths, and woodlands, far from swarming towns and clamorous cities. Buggins, on the contrary, would not leave us a green leaf nor a blade of grass. He prefers a chimney-pot to the loveliest flower that ever bloomed, and a lamp-post to the finest tree that ever dallied with the breeze. Buggins would