We left Romsey by the grateful shade of Broadlands, and entered the New Forest at the hamlet of Ower. Here close battalions of firs lined the way on either side, and continued with us past Coppithorne church, until we reached Cadnam--Cadnam, a ravelled-out settlement emerging insensibly from the Forest and merging again into its groves by equally easy and insensible stages. We plunged into thick glades where a deep hush prevailed in a secondary lighting, varied occasionally by a first-hand patch of sunlight, yellow upon the delicate grass as gold of Australian mintage. This was one of the oldest glades in the Forest, where giant boles proclaimed an age of centuries. Comparatively few of these oldsters remain, so constant and extensively has the woodman’s axe been swung. Perhaps these, too, are doomed. Let us hope they will last our time, but assuredly they will be accorded no more extended grace. When the land-agitators have had their way, when the Socialist shall have come in power, there will be a short way with forests, I promise you, as of everything else that cannot make out a _prima facie_ case of immediate usefulness. The economic times that are coming when these little islands shall be so crowded that the lordly parks and gardens, the mazy forests, and heathy lands, will be cut up into allotments, or used for sites of Socialist barracks, will be more destructive than the days that witnessed Rome’s long agony, the irruption of the Goths, or the fanatic fury of our Puritan days. Art and letters, and all the graces of life will be swallowed up between the struggle for existence and the gloomy social tenets of the new Roundheads in our children’s children’s days. Who that early Victorian poet was I cannot now recall, that rejoiced in being born in our era, nor can I swear to the accuracy of the quotation, but his pæan ran thus, did it not? “The joys of ancient times let others state: I think it lucky I was born so late.” Lucky enough, he is dead now. But were he alive, ’tis conceivable that, having an eye to signs and portents, he would say with me, “_I_ think it lucky I was born so soon.” Meanwhile, the objects most commonly met with in the New Forest are timber-wagons and New Forest ponies. The Forest, has a character of its own, with subsidiary traits and divagations that defy monotony. Ancient woods give place to modern plantations; beech succeeds to oak, and gloomy firs to either. Clearings and plantations, heaths and hamlets, and murmuring alleys of foliage, alternate for mile after mile, and moss-carpeted drives everywhere radiate from the orthodox highways. This journey was not an exploration of the New Forest; these woodlands were but incidents in our itinerary; thus it was that we did not penetrate to Stony Cross and Rufus Stone, but kept straight ahead for Lyndhurst.