In a small house by the roadside in the middle of the forest I found a temporary home. My aged landlady proved a great talker, and treated me to a good deal of Hampshire dialect. Her mind was well stored with ancient memories. At first I let her ramble on without paying too much attention; but at length, while speaking of the many little ups and downs of her not uneventful life, she asked me if I knew Selborne, and then informed me that she was a native of that village, and that her family had lived there for generations. Her mother had reached the age of eighty-six years; she had married {206} her third husband when over seventy. By her first she had had two and by her second thirteen children, and my informant, who is now aged seventy-six, was the last born. This wonderful mother of hers, who had survived three husbands, and whose memory went back several years into the eighteenth century, had remembered the Rev. Gilbert White very well: she was aged about twelve when he died. It was wonderful, she said, how many interesting things she used to tell about him; for Gilbert White, whose name was known to the great world outside of his parish, was often in her mind when she recalled her early years. Unfortunately, these interesting things had now all slipped out of my landlady's memory. Whenever I brought her to the point she would stand with eyes cast down, the fingers of her right hand on her forehead, trying--trying to recall something to tell me: a simple creature, who was without imagination, and could invent nothing. Then little by little she would drift off into something else--to recollections of people and events not so remote in time, scenes she had witnessed herself, and which had made a deeper impression on her mind. One was how her father, her mother's second husband, had acted as horn-blower to the "Selborne mob," when the poor villagers were starving; and how, blowing on his horn, he had assembled his fellow-revolutionists, and led them to an attack on the poorhouse, where they broke down the doors and made a bonfire of the furniture; then on to the neighbouring village of Headley to get recruits for their {207} little army. Then the soldiery arrived on the scene, and took them prisoners and sent them to Winchester, where they were tried by some little unremembered Judge Jeffreys, who sentenced many or most of them to transportation; but not the horn-blower, who had escaped, and was in hiding among the beeches of the famous Selborne Hanger. Only at midnight he would steal down into the village to get a bite of food and hear the news from his vigorous and vigilant wife. At length, during one of these midnight descents, he was seen, and captured, and sent to Winchester. But by this time the authorities had grown sick--possibly ashamed--of dealing so harshly with a few poor peasants, whose sufferings had made them mad, and the horn-blower was pardoned, and died in bed at home when his time came.