NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. Pa 
Cur old race of deer-stealers are hardly extinct yet : it was but a 
little while ago that, over their ale, they used to recount the exploits 
of their youth ; such as watching the pregnant hind to her lair, and, 
when the calf was dropped, paring its feet with a penknife to the 
quick to prevent its escape, till it was large and fat enough to be 
killed ; the shooting at one of their neighbours with a bullet in a 
turnip-field by moonshine, mistaking him for a deer; and the losing 
a dog in the following extraordinary manner :—Some fellows, sus~ 
pecting that a calf new-fallen was deposited in a certain spot of 
thick fern, went, with a lurcher, to surprise it; when the parent- 
hind rushed out of the brake, and, taking a vast spring with all her 
feet close together, pitched upon the neck of the dog, and broke it 
short in two. 
Another temptation to idleness and sporting was a number of 
rabbits, which possessed all the hillocks and dry places: but these 
being inconvenient to the huntsmen, on account of their burrows, 
when they came to take away the deer, they permitted the country- 
people to destroy them all. 
Such forests and wastes, when their allurements to irregularities 
are removed, are of considerable service to the neighbourhoods that 
verge upon them, by furnishing them with peat and turf for their 
firing; with fuel for the burning their lime ; and with ashes for 
their grasses; and by maintaining their geese and their stock of 
young cattle at little or no expense. 
The manor-farm of the parish of Greatham has an admitted 
claim, I see (by an old record taken from the Tower of London), 
of turning all live stock on the forest, at proper seasons, ‘‘ bidentibus 
exceptis.”* The reason, I presume, why sheepf are excluded, is, 
because, being such close grazers, they would pick out all the finest 
grasses, and hinder the deer from thriving. 
Though (by statute 4 and 5 W. and Mary, c. 23) ‘‘to burn on any 
waste, between Candlemas and Midsummer, any grig, ling, heath 
and furze, goss or fern, is punishable with whipping and confine- 
ment in the house of correction;’’ yet, in this forest, about March 
or April, according to the dryness of the season, such vast heath- 
was generally more than adequate to the loss sustained, the peasantry were satisfied, and 
found in the arrangement no cause of complaint ; when suddenly, in 1848, although the 
preceding years the indemnity received by them had been nearly doubled, they discovered 
that such a state of things could exist no longer ; and thus, supreme authority ceding to 
popular will, a general extermination of the game took place throughout the land.” 
* For this privilege the owners of that estate used to pay to the king annually seven 
bushels of oats. 
+ Inthe Holt, where a full stock of fallow-deer has been kept up till lately, no sheep are 
admitted to this day. 
