oS6 REMINISCENCES OF A HUNTSMAN. 



vinced that in some places the orders of the Com- 

 mission were not obeyeJ, and that, simply for the sake 

 of the heads of bucks. I found two male deer, bare 

 bucks then, who would have been warrantable bucks 

 now, dead in the forest from rifle balls, that had 

 escaped wounded, to perish, of no use to any one ; 

 and, as to the buck I am speaking of, I saw the fol- 

 lowing mysterious flict happen. Druid had found 

 him in Wotton enclosure, while Mr. Lindsay was 

 with me. The woodman, Gulliver, saw him first, 

 and reported him to me to be either a bare buck or 

 a year older, he could not distinctly see which ; I saw 

 him afterwards, and was perfectly sure to the same 

 extent, just as he reached the high road by the 

 turnpike near Ilolmesley enclosure, out of which 

 road, after a few strides, he gained the cover. Be- 

 tween the time when I saw him over the road and 

 his jumping into the cover, the fairies seemed to have 

 changed him into a doe, and they could not have been 

 three seconds about it ; to prove what I say, the 

 keepers shot at this deer, and asserted that in their 

 eyes it was a doe. In July in the succeeding summer, 

 Mr. Boultbee and myself being together, Druid found 

 a buck in his second year of buckhood, but in his 

 sixth year from the time of his birth, about the same 

 place where he had found the buck metamorphosed 

 by the fairies, and after working him some time round 

 the wood, Mr. Boultbee's horn signaled him away in 

 the direction of the railroad, and then he viewed him 

 ahead of the hound over a railway bridge into the 

 heath near the keeper's lodge. Ahead of the buck 

 was a vast extent of high fern and gorse, where, after 

 his work in the wood we deemed it not unlikely that 

 he would lie down, so the thing to do was to '"slot" 



