NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 17 



This lonely domain is a very agreeable haunt for many 

 sorts of wild fowls, which not 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 particular, 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 common, and that 

 was the heath-cock, black-game, or grouse. When I was a 

 little boy I recollect one coming now and then to my 

 father's table. The last pack remembered was killed about 

 thirty-five years ago ; and within these ten years one 

 solitary grey hen was sprung by some beagles in beating for 

 a hare. The sportsmen cried out " A hen pheasant ! " but 

 a gentleman present, who had often seen grouse in the 

 north of England, assured me that it was a grey hen. 



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 a hundred 

 years. This person assures me, that his father has often 

 told him, that Queen Anne, as she was journeying on the 



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