6 LIFE AND SPORT IN HAMPSHIRE 



the air and space within their sphere for their 

 sole use. 



These are arguments against the underwoods. 

 Country economy adds others. The crop of hazel, 

 ash, and oak underwoods ten or fourteen years old 

 in so many places to-day has not a fourth of its old 

 value. Where in the 'sixties and 'seventies it would 

 fetch twelve, even sixteen, pounds an acre for wattle- 

 hurdles and faggots or bavins, it fetches but three 

 or four to-day. Less and less we bake our bread 

 slowly in the good brick oven heated by an under- 

 wood fire that burns out in the clean grey ash. 

 No loaf tastes so good and wholesome as the wood- 

 baked loaf. Our fathers in this were the truer 

 epicures. But we cannot wait for such a slow 

 baking now. Coal, too, is hawked about in small 

 quantities almost everywhere; and there is the little 

 oil-stove for the villager. So the faggot or bavin, 

 in old days one of the necessities of the villager, 

 part of the staff of life, has lost much of its worth. 

 The stack of underwood, piled high against the 

 back of the old thatched cottage, is still seen in 

 hamlets, giving a warm and pleasing idea of fore- 

 thought against the winter; but every year I see 

 now what I never saw as a boy small wood, in 

 faggots or loose, rotting in the coppices. Sometimes, 

 to rid the ground of it, the woodman will make a 

 bonfire of the rougher stuff which in old times 

 was always worth binding together and carting from 



