OF SELBORNE. 27 



This lonely domain is a very agreeable haunt for 

 many sorts of wild fowls, which riot only frequent it in 

 the winter, but breed there in the summer ; such as 

 lapwings, snipes, wild-ducks, and, as I have discovered 

 within these few years, teals. Partridges in vast plenty 

 are bred in good seasons on the verge of this forest, 

 into which they love to make excursions : and in parti- 

 cular, in the dry summers of 1740 and 1741, and some 

 years after, they swarmed to such a degree; that parties 

 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 com- 

 mon, and that was the heath-cock, or black game. 

 When I was a little boy I recollect one corning now 

 and then to my father's table. The last pack remem- 

 bered, was killed about thirty-five years ago ; and 

 within these ten years one solitary gray hen was 

 sprung by some beagles in beating for a hare. The 



three or four inches. On some of them the character of the oak bark was 

 well preserved. Above the peat is a layer of sand of eighteen inches or 

 two feet in thickness. On the top of this rests a thick layer of turf; 

 consisting of the blended roots of many generations of heath and other 

 plants, and approaching, in its lower part, to the character of the genuine 

 bog. It is from this compact layer that the greater number of the larger 

 blocks are obtained. Most of them exhibit but little of the charred 

 appearance ; their character is rather that of washed and bleached timber. 

 They are of comparatively recent date ; and, although no trees, nor even 

 shrubs, are now growing by this peat-moor, stumps are occasionally 

 stumbled against, among the heath, which belong, most probably, to the 

 same era with the bleached and larger trunks. To the trunks the comr 

 mencement of the roots remain, in most instances, attached ; and the 

 almost horizontal mode in which the main roots spread away from the 

 base of the stem, is quite in accordance with their having grown in a 

 soil difficult to be penetrated, and retaining moisture near the surface 

 alone. Among this bleached kind of upper bog timber there were, 

 towards the end of 1835, many stumps of oak of six and seven feet in 

 length and of thirty to forty inches in circumference ; portions of fir of 

 thirty inches in circumference ; and the lower part of one well-grown 

 stem of a young fir, fifteen feet in length and about five inches in 

 diameter. E. T. B. 



