64 
NATURE NOTES 
scant herbage, bracken, heather, and groups of shaggy ponies 
and cattle ranging at will, with no apparent fence or barrier to 
prevent their wandering nearly to the Isle of Wight, acts as a 
foil and offers a sharp contrast to the sylvan solitudes to be 
found further on. The village of Brockenhurst affords a pleasant 
resting place, with its one or two picturesque old inns gabled 
and ivy-grown, village green and rural surroundings. One 
cottage was a perfect bower of greenery and blossom ; a dense 
growth of wild clematis had taken complete possession of it and 
hung in trailing festoons from the ridge piece to the ground. 
The clematis was in full bloom, and presented a charming 
picture. Whilst I was admiring this cottage I could hear in 
the distance a patter of many feet, ripples of laughter and joyous 
talk. Presently, in a bend of the walk, I caught a glint of a 
flag at the head of a long procession of boys and girls, as they 
came in a living stream of ever-changing colour and motion, 
white, scarlet, blue, crimson, and orange intermingling in 
kaleidoscopic confusion. It reminded one of the children 
following “ The Pied Piper of Hamelin : ” 
All the little boys and girls. 
With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls. 
And sparkling eyes, and teeth like pearls. 
Tripping and skipping, ran merrily after 
The wonderful music with shouts and laughter. 
But not in this case to enter the enchanted regions through 
Koppelbery Hill, but to spend a holiday in the forest. Follow- 
ing in their wake in the direction of Lyndhurst, I soon found an 
opportunity of leaving the high road for the forest. The first 
living thing I saw in it was a weasel, and a little further on the 
inevitable gipsies turned up, a tiny column of smoke curling 
above the trees betraying their presence. Black-haired, tawny 
slips of girls, with battered straw-hats, shoeless feet, a strip of 
red shawl crossed over their shoulders and brought round the 
waist, in long-drawn plaintive tones begged for a copper. There 
must be some innate artistic instinct to guide these picturesque 
nomads in the selection of colours. What can be more telling 
as an accompaniment to that swarthy brunette complexion than 
that bit of red colouring in the shawl and the string of blue-and- 
white beads on the brown neck ? The old white horse, the 
dingy canvas tent, the ramshackle cart, are all in keeping. As 
interesting adjuncts to our lanes and woodlands who would like 
to banish them ? A little further on I came on a tinker pitching 
his tent. A cheery soul seemed this tinker, with his household 
gods all around him, his children at play on a patch of green- 
sward under his eye, his wheel painted a bright-green standing 
hard by ready for any amount of grinding, his house water- 
tight and cosy, with no tiresome stairs to climb, a house that 
can be shifted in twenty minutes and transported to any charm- 
ing site he may take a fancy to for many a mile round. No 
