I know, however, it is impossible to make people see this beauty, which, after all, exists only in each beholder’s mind. No two people see the same thing, and no person ever sees it twice. But, I believe, we may all gain some idea of the glory which each season brings—some glimpses of the heaven of beauty which ever surrounds us—if we will seek for them patiently and reverently. They cannot with some be learnt at once, but, in degrees, are attainable by all; but they are attainable only upon this one condition,—that we go to Nature with a docile, loving spirit, without which nothing can be learnt. If we go with any other feeling, we had much better stay in a town amidst the congenial smoke, than profane Nature with the pride of ignorance and the insolence of condescension. [Illustration: The Charcoal Burner’s Path, Winding Shoot.] CHAPTER III. ITS EARLY HISTORY. [Illustration: The Cattle Ford, Liney Hill Wood.] Once the New Forest occupied nearly the entire south-west angle of Hampshire, stretching, when at its largest, in the beginning of the reign of Edward I., from the Southampton Water on the east, whose waves, the legend says, reproved the courtiers of Canute, to the Avon, and even, here and there, across it, on the west; and on the north from the borders of Wiltshire to the English Channel. These natural boundaries were, as we shall see, reduced in that same reign. Since then encroachments on all sides have still further lessened its limits; and it now stretches, here and there divided by manors and private property, on the north from the village of Bramshaw, beyond Stoney Cross, near where Rufus fell, or was supposed to fall, to Wootton on the south, some thirteen miles; and, still further, from Hardley on the east to Ringwood, the Rinwede of _Domesday_, on the west.