104 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 
Those who know Exmoor will recognise these signs in 
a moment; it is a fraying-post where the stags rubbed 
the velvet from their horns last summer. There are 
herds of red deer in the park. At one time there were 
said to be almost as many as run free and wild over the 
expanse of Exmoor. They mark the trees very much, 
especially those with the softer bark. Wire fencing has 
been put round many of the hollies to protect them. A 
stag occasionally leaps the boundary and forages among 
the farmers’ corn, or visits a garden, and then the owner 
can form some idea of what must have been the diff- 
culties of agriculture in medizval days. Deer more 
than double the interest of a park. A park without 
deer is like a wall without pictures. However well 
proportioned the room, something is lacking if the walls 
be blank. However noble the oaks and wide the sweep 
of sward, there is something wanting if antlers do not 
rise above the fern. The pictures that the deer make 
are moving and alive; they dissolve and re-form ina 
distant frame of tree and brake. Lately the herd has 
been somewhat thinned, having become too numerous. 
One slope is bare of grass, a patch of yellow sand, which 
if looked at intently from a distance seems presently to 
be all alive like mites in cheese, so thick are the rabbits 
in the warren. Under a little house, as it were, built 
over a stream is a chalybeate fountain with virtues like 
those of Tunbridge Wells. 
The park is open to visitors—here comes a gay four- 
in-hand heavily loaded sweeping by on its road to that 
summer town. There is much ironstone in the soil 
round about. At the edge of the park stands an old 
farmhouse of timber and red tile, with red oast-house 
beside it, built with those gables which our ancestors ~ 
seemed to think made such excellent rooms within. 
