Though it would be rather straining the point to allude to them as the homesteads which it is the object of this work to delineate, a passing mention may be made of the caves with which this part of England abounded, and which made such safe retreats for outlaws in those days. Many of these are of natural formation, either owing to the porous yielding limestone being eroded by water, or to the rock commonly called “pudding-stone” being disintegrated. Some are artificial, as the one called “Robin Hood’s Stable,” which is, however, more like a chapel, and probably has served as one. Sherwood Forest has for generations been yielding to the axe and the plough, though a goodly number of the old trees yet remain. The trunks, which are found bedded in the ground, induced a very intelligent writer to say that it had once before been levelled for cultivation, but this is probably not the case, for those who could fell a tree would know its value for domestic uses. Camden gives the clue to these relics. “It was anciently thick set with trees, whose entangled branches were so thickly twisted together that they hardly left room for a single person to pass,” and such a state of vegetation is soon fatal to the growth of large trees. Many American forests are similar to the Sherwood that Camden describes; the writer has not unfrequently heard the crash of some tall forest tree, whose roots were strangled and starved; indeed a traveller is often surprised, on entering some grand-looking wood, either in Canada or the States, to find it paved with huge trunks between which a more recent growth appeared. Such a place, with its caverns and its vast extent, might easily enable a freebooter and his bands to set authority at defiance, especially when his followers were desperate men, often flying from the mutilation or death they had subjected themselves to by breaking the forest laws; nor were the exploits of these bands confined to the limits of Sherwood. We find Robin Hood turning up in Derby and Yorkshire: a bay there yet bears his name. As an instance of the way in which a forest may disappear, might be mentioned the celebrated Wirral Forest in Cheshire, occupying at one time the dreary promontory between the Dee and the Mersey. Now hardly a bush can be induced to grow here, but at one time it was so thickly wooded that there was an old saying “From Birkenhead to Hilbere, A squirrel may go from tree to tree.”