14 RED DEER. 



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 succes- 

 sion far more than an hundred years. This person assures 

 me, that his father has often told him that Queen Anne, as 

 she was journeying 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 Queen's 

 Bank, saw, with great complacency and satisfaction, 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 

 yeomen 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 

 shewed extraordinary diversion ; but in the following winter, 

 when the hinds were also carried off, such fine chases were 



scarce in the southern counties ; a few are to be met with in the New 

 Forest, Hampshire, Dartmore, and Sedgemore, in Devonshire, and in 

 some of the heathy hills of Somersetshire, which lie contiguous to Devon- 

 shire ; and in Staffordshire and North Wales. They abound in the south 

 and north of Scotland. The Earl of Fife has procured a breed of that 



oubt of his succeeding, as they were 



nrouce no preserves n ngan w gre ucess. 

 obtains ground, it drives the common species out of the preserves, and 

 threatens in time, like the Norway rat, to exterminate the aboriginal 



