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 greyhen 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 grouse in the north of England, assured me that
it was a greyhen.
Nor does the loss of our black game prove the only gap in the
Fauna Selborniensis; 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 succession for more than an
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 forest of Wolmer beneath her
royal regard.
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