- 
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. ; r3 
fore rather suppose that they were parts of a willow or alder, 
or some such aquatic tree. 
This lonely domain is a very agreeable haunt for many sorts 
of wild fowls, which not only frequent it in the winter, but 
breed there in the summer; such as lapwings, snipes, wild- 
ducks, and, as I have discovered within these few years, teals. 
Partridges in vast plenty are bred in good seasons on the verge 
of this forest, into which they love to make excursions; and 
in particular, in the dry summers of 1740 and 1741, and some 
years after, they swarmed to such a degree that parties of un- 
reasonable sportsmen killed twenty and sometimes thirty brace 
in a day. 
But there was a nobler species of game in this forest, now 
extinct, which I have heard old people say abounded much 
before shooting flying became so cummon, and that was the 
-heath-cock, black-game or grouse. When I was a little boy I 
recollect one coming now and then to my father’s table. The 
last pack remembered was killed about thirty-five years ago, 
and within these ten years one solitary gray hen was sprung by 
some beagles in beating for a hare. ‘The sportsmen cried out 
“A hen pheasant!” but a gentleman present, who had often 
seen black-game in the north of England, assured me that it 
was a gray hen. 
Nor does the loss of our black-game prove the only gap in 
the Fauna of Selborne. For another beautiful link in the 
chain of beings is wanting: I mean the red deer, which toward 
the beginning of this century amounted to about five hundred 
head, and made a stately appearance. ‘There is an old keeper, 
now alive, named Adams, whose great-grandfather (mentioned 
‘in a perambulation taken in 1635), grandfather, father, and 
self, enjoyed the head keepership of Wolmer Forest in suc- 
cession for more than a hundred years. ‘This person assures 
me, that his father has often told him, that Queen Anne, as 
she was journeying on the Portsmouth road, did not think the 
