“t20 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE, 
LETTER IX. 
By way of supplement, I shall trouble you once more on 
this subject, to inform you that Wolmer, with her sister 
forest Ayles Holt, alias Alice Holt, as it is called in old rec- 
ords, is held by grant from the crown for a term of years. 
The grantees that the author remembers are Brigadier- 
General Emanuel Scroope Howe, and his lady, Ruperta, who 
was a daughter of Prince Rupert; a Mr. Mordaunt, of the 
Peterborough family, who married a dowager Lady Pembroke; 
Henry Bilson Legge and lady; and now Lord Stawell, their 
son. 
The lady of General Howe lived to an advanced age, long 
surviving her husband; and, at her death, left behind her 
many curious pieces of mechanism of her father’s constructing, 
who was a distinguished mechanic and artist, as well as 
warrior ; and among the rest, a very complicated clock, lately 
in possession of Mr. Elmer, the celebrated game-painter at 
Farnham, in the county of Surrey. 
Though these two forests are only parted by a narrow 
range of enclosures, yet no two soils can be more different ; 
for the Holt consists of a strong loam, of a miry nature, carry- 
ing a good turf, and abounding with oaks that grow to be 
large timber ; while Wolmer is nothing but a hungry, sandy, 
barren waste. 
The former being all in the parish of Binsted, is about two 
miles in extent from north to south, and near as much from 
east to west; and contains within it many woodlands and lawns, 
and the great lodge where the grantees reside, and a smaller 
lodge called Goose Green; and is abutted on by the parishes 
of Kingsley, Frinsham, Farnham, and Bentley; all of which 
have right of common. 
One thing is remarkable: that though the Holt has been of 
old well stocked with fallow-deer, unrestrained by any pales 
