26 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 



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, suspecting 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 hunts- 

 men, 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. 1 The reason, I pre- 

 sume, why sheep 2 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 confinement in the house of correction;" 

 yet, in this forest, about March or April, according to the 



1 For this privilege the owners of that estate used to pay to the king annually 

 seven bushels of oats. [G. W.] 



1 In The Holt, where a full stock of fallow-deer has been kept up till lately, 

 no sheep are admitted to this day. [G. W.] 



