BROCKENHUEST REVISITED. 149 



was nothing to prevent our working there for the night ; but it 

 appeared that he had worked there the night before, and so claimed 

 to keep everyone else out of these rides as long as he chose. 

 The noise of the strife soon attracted several other collectors 

 from a distance, and the row became worse and worse. Just at 

 this juncture up came one of the Forest plantation keepers and 

 tried to quell the disturbance ; but after some fruitless expostu- 

 lations, and bewailing the mistake he had hitherto laboured 

 under, that we ''flycatchers were a peaceful set of beings," he 

 suddenly asked what right any of us had in the plantation, 

 inasmuch as those portions of the Forest were specially closed 

 to the public by the "Kanger's orders," and he added that he 

 must beg all who had not a special written permission from the 

 Deputy Eanger to clear out of the enclosure forthwith. This 

 stopped the babel of voices like the falling of a bombshell in our 

 midst, and after a demand for each and all to show his written 

 permission, it so turned out that Turner was the only one out of 

 the ten or twelve collectors then gathered together who possessed 

 the Deputy Ranger's written permit. There was no help for it : 

 we had all to beat a retreat in as dignified a way as we could, 

 leaving ''the Grasshopper" in sole possession. The next 

 morning I made it my business to call upon Mr. Cumberbatch, 

 the then Deputy Ranger, living at Lyndhurst; and, after hearing 

 the account of the previous night's occurrence, he gave me a 

 written permission, which I still have in my pocket-book, though 

 I was never again interrupted, and never asked to produce it ! 



Pleasant indeed it was to revisit those old haunts of forty 

 years ago ! I missed the "black-veined white" butterfly, then 

 abundant at that part of the Forest. It is difficult to conjecture 

 even the cause of its disappearance. No tale has ever been told 

 of its merciless extermination by collectors ; the whitethorns are 

 there still, the direct descendants doubtless of those among which 

 William Rufus may have ridden in the chase ; — some of these 

 said whitethorns are indeed pictures of scraggy, mossy old age 

 and decay, and may well be a thousand years old — why then 

 has Aporia cratcegi disappeared ? 



My present visit, however, was not just to go over the old 

 ground for the mere sake of the old associations, nor yet to 

 collect Lepidoptera, but to work for several local and rare spiders, 

 of which my friend, Mr. Cecil Warburton, of Christ's College, 

 Cambridge, had the previous summer come across some stray 

 specimens. After working in the thickest brakes of black and 

 white thorns, at the cost of an umbrella, a net or two, and much 

 damage to our garments, my nephew (F. Pickard-Cambridge) 

 and myself succeeded in finding all but one species during the 

 June visit. The best of these, Hyptiotes paradoxus, Koch 

 (only once, before Mr. Warburton met with it, recorded in 

 Great Britain), was not yet in the adult state ; a second 



