Looking away from Beaulieu towards Southampton Water there is seen on the border of the wide brown heath a long line of tall firs, a vast dark grove forming the horizon on that side. This is the edge of an immense wood, and beyond the pines which grow by the heath, it is almost exclusively oak with an undergrowth of holly. It is low-lying ground with many streams and a good deal of bog, and owing to the dense undergrowth and the luxuriance of vegetation generally this part of the forest has a ruder, wilder appearance than at any other spot. Here, too, albeit the nobler bird and animal forms are absent, as is indeed the case in all the New Forest district, animal life generally is in greatest profusion and variety. This wood with its surrounding heaths, bogs, and farm lands, has been my favourite summer resort and hunting-ground for {54} some years past. With a farm-house not many minutes' walk from the forest for a home, I have here spent long weeks at a time, rambling in the woods every day and all day long, for the most time out of sight of human habitations, and always with the feeling that I was in my own territory, where everything was as Nature made it and as I liked it to be. Never once in all my rambles did I encounter that hated being, the collector, with his white, spectacled town face and green butterfly net. In this out-of-the-way corner of the Forest one could imagine the time come when this one small piece of England which lies between the Avon and Southampton Water will be a sanctuary for all rare and beautiful wild life and a place of refreshment to body and soul for all men. The richest, fullest time of the year is when June is wearing to an end, when one knows without the almanac that spring is over and gone. Nowhere in England is one more sensible of the change to fullest summer than in this low-lying, warmest corner of Hampshire. The cuckoo ceases to weary us with its incessant call, and the nightingale sings less and less frequently. The passionate season is well-nigh over for birds; their fountain of music begins to run dry. The cornfields and waste grounds are everywhere splashed with the intense scarlet of poppies. Summer has no rain in all her wide, hot heavens to give to her thirsty fields, and has sprinkled them with the red fiery moisture from her own veins. And as colour {55} changes, growing deeper and more intense, so do sounds change: for the songs of yesterday there are shrill hunger-cries. [Sidenote: Young blackbird's call]