People talk rather loosely of the "wild" creatures of the Forest, including in the phrase the ponies and the pigs; but in truth nothing larger than a fox or a badger is really wild in the sense that lions and tigers in the jungle are--that is, masterless. The deer are the property of the Crown, and as to the rough, shaggy, hammer-headed ponies, though they roam at large day in, day out, winter and summer, and find their own subsistence, their notched tails mark them as belonging to some forester with grazing rights. At one time stallions were turned loose in the Forest to improve the breed, but these were Crown property, and now neither they nor bulls are allowed at large, and boar have ceased to exist. The pigs certainly all belong to the cottagers, and are now no longer seen in big flocks at pannage, that is from 22 September till 25 November. There is a charming account in one of Mr. Gilpin's volumes of the swineherd who used to take charge of all the pigs of a large district during this season, giving them warm food and shelter at night, so that they would collect from their wide wanderings at the sound of his pipe. The breed of pigs which was indigenous to the Forest has now died out--probably the make did not lend itself to good hams. Gilpin thus describes them: "Besides these (the domestic pigs) there are others in the more desolate parts of the Forest, bred wild and left to themselves, descendants of the wild boar imported by Charles I from Germany (probably at the suggestion of his nephew, the Elector Palatine). They had broad shoulders, high crest, bristly mane, the hinder parts light, and they were fiercer than the common breed." Writing some fifty years later, Wise alludes to their shaggy coats, brindled and rust colour, and I myself can remember them as he describes them. By Fritham and Sloden are some of the most noteworthy of those mysterious barrows, locally called butts, which have exercised the curiosity of antiquaries. Others are found across the valley, on the heights by Bushy Bratley, and there are several on Setley Plain. Wise in his _History_ gives a very full and interesting account of the opening of some of these tumuli both by himself and by Warner, who wrote on _The South-western Parts of Hampshire_. Invariably there was found burnt earth and charcoal, together with calcined human remains, in some cases contained in urns of "rude forms and large size", which led him to the conclusion that they are the funeral pyres of the ancient Britons, probably long anterior to the Roman Invasion. The hints they give of life in the Forest in far-past days are indeed scanty, but their presence, standing age-long on remote uplands, suggests strange visions of the long succession of races that have dwelt here. BURLEY, THE WESTERN BORDER