eft in the English lowlands. It was made a royal forest
by William the Norman, and thus continues to the present time, the
largest tract of uncultivated land and one of the finest examples of
woodland scenery in the kingdom. It covers almost the whole surface
between Southampton Water and the Avon, which is the western border of
Hampshire, but in recent years its area has been gradually curtailed,
though its extent has never been accurately measured. Stretching about
fifteen miles from east to west and twenty miles from north-west to
south-east, it includes about ninety-one thousand acres, of which
twenty-six thousand belong to private landowners, two thousand are the
absolute property of the Crown, and the remaining sixty-three thousand
acres have common and other rights due to a large number of tenants,
though the title is in the Crown. About twenty-five thousand acres are
covered with timber, but only five thousand acres of this is old timber,
the remainder having been planted with trees within the last two hundred
years. The surface is gently undulating, becoming hilly in the northern
parts; the soil is usually arid, and the scenery discloses wide expanses
of heathery moor, often marshy in the lower grounds, with here and there
copses that gradually thicken into woodland as the true forest district
is approached. The chief trees are oak and beech, which attain to noble
proportions, while there are occasional tufts of holly and undergrowth.

[Illustration: NEW FOREST, FROM BRAMBLE HILL.]

[Illustration: RUFUS'S STONE.]

Almost in the centre of the forest is the village of Lyndhurst, regarded
as the best point of departure for its survey--a hamlet with one long
street and houses dotted about on the flanks of a hill, the summit of
which is adorned by a newly-built church of red brick with bath-stone
dressings. Within this church is Sir Frederick Leighton's fresco of the
"Wise and Foolish Virgins." In the ponderous "Queen's House," near the
church, lives the chief official of the forest, and here are held the
courts. Formerly, this official was always a prince royal and known as
the lord warden, but now his powers are vested in the "First
Commissioner of Woods and Forests:" here the poacher was in former days
severely punished. The New Forest was originally not only a place for
the king's pleasure in the chase, but it also furnished timber for the
royal navy, though this fell into disuse in the Civil War. Subsequently