18 NATURAL HISTOEY 



of unreasonable sportsmen killed twenty and sometimes thirty 

 brace in a day. 



But there was a nobler species of game in this forest, now 

 extinct, which I have heard old people say abounded much 

 before shooting flying became so common, and that was the 

 heath-cock, black game, or grouse. When I was a little boy 

 I recollect one coming now and then to my father's table. 

 The last pack remembered was killed about thirty-five years 

 ago; and within these ten years one solitary grey hen was 

 sprung by some beagles in beating for a hare. The sports- 

 men cried out, "A hen pheasant;" but a gentleman present, 

 who had often seen grouse in the north of England, assured 

 me that it was a grey hen*. 



Nor does the loss of our black game prove the only gap in 

 the Fauna Selborniensis ; for another beautiful link in the 

 chain of beings is wanting, I mean the red deer, which 

 toward the beginning of this century amounted to about five 

 hundred head, and made a stately appearance. There is an 

 old keeper, now alive, named Adams, whose great grandfather 

 (mentioned in a perambulation taken in 1635) grandfather, 

 father and self, enjoyed the head keepership of Wolmer forest 

 in succession for more than an hundred years. This person 

 assures me, that his father has often told him, that Queen Anne, 

 as she was journeying on the Portsmouth road, did not think 

 the forest of Wolmer beneath her royal regard. For she came 

 out of the great road at Lippock, which is just by, and repo- 

 sing herself on a bank smoothed for that purpose, lying about 

 half a mile to the east of Wolmer-pond, and still called Queen 's- 

 bank, saw with great complacency and satisfaction the whole 

 herd of red deer brought by the keepers along the vale before 

 her, consisting then of about five hundred head. A sight this 

 worthy the attention of the greatest sovereign ! But he fur- 

 ther adds that, by means of the Waltham blacks, or, to use 

 his own expression, as soon as they began blacking, they 

 were reduced to about fifty head, and so continued decreasing 



* [That the black grouse is still occasionally met with at Wolmer is 

 well attested, and this not as the result of any recent importation from 

 other localities, but as voluntary "visitants. T. B.] 



