536 
A Glance at Epping Forest. 
[September, 
VI. A GLANCE AT EPPING FOREST. 
'\®TE consider it our duty to revisit this rescued territory 
from time to time with a view of scrutinising its 
^ management, and of satisfying ourselves whether 
it is improving or retrograding. Truthfulness compels us 
to explain what we mean by improvement or retrogression. 
The Forest is improving if it becomes, from year to yeai, a 
more comfortable refuge for our native flora and fauna. It 
is retrogressing if it is becoming more monotonous in its 
features! and if animal and vegetable species once found 
here are being exterminated or driven away. . 
Accordingly on the 2nd of July we went to the Forest, in 
company with a zealous Lepidopterist, and made our ap- 
proach by way of Chingford. The day was calm and sunny, 
that everything wore its most favourable aspect. Hie 
first phenomenon which impressed itself upon our senses 
was utterly loathsome. No person can leave the Ching 01 
Station — whether he ascends the hill to the Forest Hotel, 
or takes the newly-repaired road to Sewardstone, or, as we 
did strikes diagonally over the waste into the Foies 
without crossing a most loathsome open sewer. W ho is 
responsible for a nuisance thus thrust into the way o 
thousands of excursionists we cannot say. Nor do we know 
why its emanations should be so exceptionally unholy. But 
there it is, and there it ought not to be. 
We crossed the waste land which, though disgoiged by 
the whilome encroachers, has not been, and probably never 
will be restored to its natural condition. It has, howevei, 
its attractions for “ the People.” There are swings, merry- 
go-rounds, shooting galleries, cocoa-nut shies, steam-banel 
organs grinding out discords unearthly but no heavenly 
Worst of all there are troops of under-fed horses and 
donkeys, let out by the half or quarter hour to awkwaid 
ridersf and cudgelled both by their owners and lessees. A 
truthful “ zoophilist if such a species exists— would 
confess that in the outskirts of Epping Forest alone a 
greater sum of pain is inflicted upon “ dumb animals than 
in all the physiological laboratories of the world. 
But we cannot stop to moralise. On entering the Poiest 
at its lower margin we soon found it very much changed 
from its aspect only a few years back. Numbers of trees 
