The Old World in the New Forest

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXII, Issue XVII, 23 April 1904, Page 4

The Old World in the New Forest

The Ncxx Forest is sadly misunderstood and to an alarming extent. One delusion is that it is all forest, that it is monotonous, that to have seen an acre is to have seen it all. Only those who know it can quite appreciate how little it is deserving of this. Looking at it from the railway, one might be justified in arriving at such a conclusion, but from a railway is the last place to judge a country. Alight, say, at Brockenhurst ami strike across to Lyndhurst, or to Burley, or to Milton. and what will most astonish you will he the “infinite variety*’ of landscape already mentioned. You will pass through leafy lanes bright with clambering honeysuckle, you will catch glimpses of other leafy lanes, of cultivated fields, of thatched cottage*, and timbered farmhouses; the road will run on hetxveeii the overshadowing trees of an enclosure pungent with the odour of the pine; it will convey you across stretches of moorland purple with heather and yellow with gorse, it will pass through the cool forest where all is fresh and green ami smelling of fern ami moss, ami all the time it will have been rising and (lipping, widening and narrowing. curving ami zig-zagging, sometimes rising to a height that will bswept by Ihe salt wind from the sea or descending into shady glens where all is still and listless—and so for day after day you might tramp the district, seeing scarcely a soul lif rabbits and hares and squirrels and deer and the birds of the air have not souls), and never tiring of the prospect. There is always something to interest, ij is th? happy hunting ground of the entomologist, and on a sunny day there 'reins a butterfly hovering about every furze bush, while the quietly grazing kinc or forest ponies save the place from actual solitude. 'The ponies are, ot course, one of Ihe •'sights” of the forest, semi wild little creatures, that lead a life parallel to the mustangs of the WCstern State*, and which they are not altogether unlike. One can often ap proach to within a few steps of the (piielci <ines. but there is always a moment w hen. with a toss of their shaggy manes, they will trot to a safer distance. Although apparently at liberty to roam wherever they please, each is. nevertheless, well known to its owner. 'The annual driving in of them for purpose- of identification, which takes place in the early autumn, is one of the incidents of I he local year. But the wildness of the forest, of the forest proper. with its often impenetrable bracken and lonely bye-paths, i* not altogether free from danger. for there is one creature that lends a real spirit of adventure to one’s walks here on a sunny afternoon the adder, which is sulliciently common to be reckoned a proper subject for alarm, although a bite from it is seldom recorded. Left alone it is safe enough. unless, per chance, the traveller steps upon it. but if one's legs are encased in stout gaiters the danger is reduced practically to nil. At least, it is considerably less than Ihr risks one hourly runs walking 1 he streetof London. But the snake is not here without liiparticular eneniy "Briisher Mills." an old reptile hunter, who for the last twenty years has usefully p’ssed hidays ridding the forest of it- o’»e curse, lie is often Io be met with in one's walks, a strange old son of the woods with almost a language of his own, whose hut is one of the strangest spec taeles of the forest, though seldom visited a mere erection, but a few feel high, of peat and dry sticks into which he can just crawl of nights a "home" which the darkest savage of darkest Africa would probably reject. Mills and the tent-dwellers are true children of the forest. The latter are not pure gipsies, not the gipsies in which Borrow might have delighted, at least but very few are. though the children will answer to the Romany “chi" (boy), or "chai” (girl). A free wild life they lead here, caring not for the conventionalities of modern life and worthy only as interesting evidence. in the straight limbs and well knit muscle*, of the reward* that nature ciirtoiisly will not deny to those who lead a simple life in the open, no matter how useless I hex max appear to be.

Nature, indeed, is the keynote of the forest, the eity dweller may well pause here, as often he must, suddenly overwhelmed by the realisation of the signitieauee of all this to him, of the birds and the bushes, the trees and the Howers, and "the wind upon the heath," and even if his delight in “tubes” and “undergrounds” is unabated be will return to them a little healthier for his awakening to the promises of nature.

C. ALFRED McEVOY.