"The Major was kindness itself, and so were his wife, her sister, and two children. The major had but one hobby--music. He played the violin himself, and he told me honestly that his chief reason for `taking me'-- these are his very words--was because I played with such feeling. "My evenings were happy enough in this English home of mine; my days I spent in the garden, where I was allowed to work, or in the great forest. You must not imagine, Archie, the New Forest is anything like a deer forest in our own land. There are in it no wild mountains, no deep dark dells, no beetling crags and cliffs, no cataracts, no foaming torrents; the red deer does not toss his wide antlers here and fly proudly away at your approach, nor far above you in the sky do you see the bird of Jove circling upwards round the sun. "Wilson would never have said about the New Forest,-- "`What lovely magnificence stretches around! Each sight how sublime, how awful each sound; All hushed and serene, like a region of dreams, The mountains repose 'mid the roar of the streams.' "But many a long day I spent roaming about in this forest, nevertheless. "I was charmed with the solitary grandeur of the place. I had no idea it was so extensive either, or so varied in its beauties. Why, here one might wander about for weeks and never weary, for he would always be coming to something new. Is this the reason, I wonder, that it is called the _New_ Forest? New in point of time it certainly cannot be termed, for everything in it and about it is old, extremely old. The oaks are gnarled and wrinkled, and grey with age; its elms and its ash trees, its limes and its alders, are bent and distorted by the touch of time, and the lichens that cling to their stems only add to their general appearance a look of hoariness that is far from unpleasing to the eye. "Then the heather which covers the large sweeps of moorland that you see here and there is very sturdy and strong, while from the furze or whins boats' masts could be made. "The creatures, too, that one sees while walking through this forest, seem birds and beasts of some bygone time, and look as if they hardly, if ever, saw a human being from one year's end to the other. "The hares or rabbits, instead of scurrying away at your approach, sit leisurely on one end while they wash their faces and study you. The blackbirds and the mavises hardly trouble themselves to cease their song even when you walk close by the trees on which they are perched. The great beetles and other members of the coleoptera tribe are far too busy to take the slightest notice of your presence, and the great velvety bees go on working and humming just as if there were no such creature as you within a thousand miles of them.