We do not see the Forest of our forefathers. Go back eight centuries, and look at the sights which the Normans must have beheld,—dense underwoods of hollies on which the red deer browsed; masses of beech and chestnut, the haunts of the wolf and the boar; plains over which flocks of bustards half-ran, half-flew; swamps where the crane in the sedge laid its buff and crimson-streaked eggs; whilst above grey-headed kites swam in circles; and round the coast the sea-eagle slowly flapped its heavy bulk. Great oaks, shorn flat by the Channel winds, fringed the high Hordle cliffs, towering above the sea; and opposite, as to this day, rose the white chalk rocks of the Needles, and the Isle of Wight, where at Watchingwell stretched another forest of the King’s. And the sun would set as it now does, but upon all this further beauty, making a broad path of glory across the bay, till at last it sank down over the Priory Church of Christchurch, which Flambard was then building. Gone, too, for ever all the scenes which they must have had of the Avon, glimpses of it caught among the trees as they galloped through the broad lawns, or under the sides of Godshill, and Castle Hill crested with yews and oaks.[6] These may all be gone, but plenty of beauty is still left. The Avon still flows on with its floating gardens of flowers—lilies and arrowhead, and the loosestrife waving its crimson plumes among the green reeds. The Forest streams, too, still flow on the same, losing themselves in the woods, eddying round and round in the deep, dark, prison-pools of their own making, and then escaping over shallows and ledges of rolled pebbles, left dry in the summer, and on which the sunlight rests, and the shadows of the beeches play, but in the winter chafed by the torrent. Across its broad expanse of moors the sun still sets the same in summer time—into some deep bank of clouds in the west, and as it plunges down, flashes of light run along their edges, and each thin band of vapour becomes a bar of fire, and the far-away Purbeck hills gleam with purple and amethyst. The same sea, too, still heaves and tosses beneath the Hordle and Barton Cliffs, with the same dark patches, shadows of clouds, sailing over it, as its waves, along the shore, unroll their long scrolls of foam. These great natural facts have not changed. Kelt and Roman have gone, but these are the same.