NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 23 



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 journey- 

 ing 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, reposing 

 herself on a bank smoothed for that purpose, lying about 

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

 Queers-bank, saw with great complacency and satisfac- 

 tion 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 farther 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 till the time of the 

 late Duke of Cumberland. It is now more than thirty 

 years ago that his highness sent down an huntsman, and 

 six yoeman-prickers, in scarlet jackets laced with gold, 

 attended by the stag-hounds ; ordering them to take every 

 deer in this forest alive, and to convey them in carts to 

 Windsor. In the course of the summer they caught every 

 stag, some of which showed extraordinary diversion : but 

 in the following winter, when the hinds were also carried 



is, the hens are worried and driven off the ground by the importunities of a crowd 

 of suitors, and the result is that for several years past the warders have not come 

 across a nest or brood on the Government lands." Major A. H. Cowie, who 

 recently had charge of the bird-preservation in Wolmer Forest, tells me that 

 he believes that there are none now left in the district, he never saw one alive 

 or dead. [R. B. S.] 

 1 Liphook. 



