But an occasional holiday brought some comfort, for then they were sent on a longer excursion. The favourite one was to the curious earthworks of Old Sarum, then in its glory as a "rotten borough," one alehouse, with its tea-gardens attached, sending two members to Parliament. On these excursions more liberty seems to have been permitted. The boys broke up the large flints that lay all about the ground, to find in them cavities lined with chalcedony or drusy crystals of quartz. But the chief interest centred around a mysterious excavation in the earthwork, "a deep, long subterranean tunnel, said to have been used by the garrison to get water from a river in the plain below." To this all new-comers were taken to listen to the tale of its enormous depth and subterranean pool. Then, when duly overawed, they felt their hats fly off their heads and saw them rolling out of sight down the tunnel. An interval followed of blank dismay, embittered, no doubt, by dismal anticipations of what would probably happen when they got back to the school-house. Then one of the older boys volunteered to act the sybil and lead the way to the nether world. Of course they "regained their felt and felt what they regained"--literally, for the hole was dark enough, though we may set down the "many hundred yards" (which Lyell says that he descended before he recovered his lost hat) as an instance of the permanent effect of a boyish illusion on even a scientific mind. But the restrictions of Salisbury made the liberty of the New Forest yet more dear. Bartley was an ideal home for boys. It was surrounded by meadows and park-like timber. A two-mile walk brought the lads to Rufus Stone, and on the wilder parts of the Forest. There they could ramble over undulating moors, covered with heath and fern, diversified by marshy tracts, sweet with bog-myrtle, or by patches of furze, golden in season with flowers; or they could wander beneath the shadows of its great woods of oak and beech, over the rustling leaves, among the flickering lights and shadows, winding here and there among tufts of holly scrub, always led on by the hope of some novelty--a rare insect fluttering by, a lizard or a snake gliding into the fern, strange birds circling in the air, a pheasant or even a woodcock springing up almost under the feet. The rabbits scampered to their holes among the furze; a fox now and again stole silently away to cover, or a stag--for the deer had not yet been destroyed--was espied among the tall brake. Those, too, it must be remembered, were the days when boys got their holidays in the prime of the summer, at the season of haymaking and of ripe strawberries. They were not kept stewing in hot school-rooms all through July, until the flowers are nearly over and the bright green of the foliage is dulled, until the romance of the summer's youth has given place to the dulness of its middle age. In these days it is our pleasure to do the right thing in the wrong place--a truly national