LETTER IX.

By way of supplement, I shall trouble you once more on this subject, to inform you that Wolmer, with her sister forest Ayles Holt, alias Alice Holt,1 as it is called in old records, is held by grant from the crown for a term of years.

The grantees that the author remembers are, Brigadier-General Emanuel Scroope Howe, and his lady, Ruperta, who was a daughter of Prince Rupert; a Mr. Mordaunt, of the Peterborough family, who married a dowager Lady Pembroke; Henry Bilson Legge and lady; and now Lord Stawel, their son.

The lady of General Howe lived to an advanced age, long surviving her husband; and, at her death, left behind her many curious pieces of mechanism of her father's constructing, who was a distinguished mechanic and artist, as well as warrior; and, among the rest, a very complicated clock, lately in possession of Mr. Elmer, the celebrated game painter at Farnham, in the county of Surrey.

Though these two forests are only parted by a narrow range of enclosures, yet no two soils can be

"In Rot. Inquisit. de statu forest. in Scaccar. 36 Ed. III., it is called Aisholt." In the same, "Tit. Wolmer & Aisholt Hantisc. Dominus Rex habet unam capellam in haia suâ de Kingesle." "Haia, sepes, sepimentum, parcus: a Gall. haie & haye."-Spelman's Glossary.

"And Woolmer placed hence upon the rising sunne, With Ash-holt thine allie."- Polyolbion, Second Song. 2 This prince was the inventor of mezzotinto.

more different; for the Holt consists of a strong loam, of a miry nature, carrying a good turf, and abounding with oaks that grow to be large timber, while Wolmer is nothing but a hungry, sandy, barren waste.

The former, being all in the parish of Binsted, is about two miles in extent from north to south, and near as much from east to west, and contains within it many woodlands and lawns, and the Great Lodge where the grantees reside, and a smaller lodge called Goose Green; and is abutted on by the parishes of Kingsley, Frinsham, Farnham, and Bentley, all of which have right of common.

One thing is remarkable, that, though the Holt has been of old well stocked with fallow deer, unrestrained by any pales or fences more than a common hedge, yet they are never seen within the limits of Wolmer: nor were the red deer of Wolmer ever known to haunt the thickets or glades of the Holt.

At present the deer of the Holt are much thinned and reduced by the night-hunters, who perpetually harass them, in spite of the efforts of numerous keepers, and the severe penalties that have been put in force against them, as often as they have been detected, and rendered liable to the lash of the law. Neither fines nor imprisonment can deter them; so impossible is it to extinguish the spirit of sporting, which seems to be inherent in human nature.

General Howe turned out some German wild boars and sows in his forests, to the great terror of the neighbourhood; and, at one time, a wild bull, or buffalo; but the country rose upon them and destroyed them.

A very large fall of timber, consisting of about one thousand oaks, has been cut this spring in the Holt Forest; one-fifth of which, it is said, belongs to the grantee, Lord Stawel. He lays claim also to the lop and top; but the poor of the parishes of Binsted and Frinsham, Bentley and Kingsley, assert that it

belongs to them; and assembling in a riotous manner, have actually taken it all away. One man, who keeps a team, has carried home for his share forty stacks of wood. Forty-five of these people his lordship has served with actions. These trees, which were very sound, and in high perfection, were winter-cut, viz. in February and March, before the bark would run. In old times, the Holt was estimated to be eighteen miles, computed measure, from water-carriage, viz.

from the town of Chertsey on the Thames; but now it is not half that distance, since the Wey is made navigable up to the town of Godalming, in the county of Surrey.

LETTER X.

Aug. 4, 1767.

IT has been my misfortune never to have had any neighbours whose studies have led them towards the pursuit of natural knowledge; so that, for want of a companion to quicken my industry and sharpen my attention, I have made but slender progress in a kind of information to which I have been attached from my childhood.

As to SWALLOWs (hirundines rustica) being found in a torpid state during the winter in the Isle of Wight, or any part of this country, I never heard any such account worth attending to. But a clergyman, of an inquisitive turn, assures me, that when he was a great boy, some workmen, in pulling down the battlements of a church tower early in the spring, found two or three swifts (hirundines apodes) among the rubbish, which were, at first appearance, dead; but, on being carried toward the fire, revived. He told me that, out of his great care to preserve them, he put them in a paper bag, and hung them by the kitchen fire, where they were suffocated.

Another intelligent person has informed me that while he was a schoolboy at Brighthelmstone, in Sussex, a great fragment of the chalk cliff fell down one stormy winter on the beach, and that many

people found swallows among the rubbish; but, on my questioning him whether he saw any of those birds himself, to my no small disappointment he answered me in the negative, but that others assured him they did.

Young broods of swallows began to appear this year on July the 11th, and young martins (hirundines urbica) were then fledged in their nests. Both species will hatch again once; for I see by my Fauna of last year, that young broods came forth so late as SepAre not these late hatchings more

tember the 18th.

in favour of hiding than migration? Nay, some young martins remained in their nests last year so late as September the 29th; and yet they totally disappeared with us by the 5th of October.

How strange it is, that the swift, which seems to