teams with crowded
coaches, and great covered waggons laden with merchandise; the
highwayman at dusk in quest of belated travellers, and companies of
farmers and cattle-dealers riding home from market together for
safety.

I often see a vision here in the ancient Forest tracks of a gang of
wild and armed smugglers, and among them still more savage-looking
foreign sailors. They have two or three Forest trucks, made especially
to fit the ruts in the little-used tracks, laden with casks of spirits
and drawn by rough Forest ponies. I can hear the shouts of the drivers
as they urge them forward, and I can see the steaming sides of the
ponies in the misty moonlight of a winter night. The spirits were
landed at Poole or Christchurch, and they are on their way to Burley
where, under the old house I bought with my land, there is still the
cellar, then cleverly concealed, where the casks were stored in safety
from the watchful eyes of the Excise; a quaint old place built of the
local rock.

There is one vision of the roads in the Forest which nobody who saw it
can ever forget: the companies of infantry, the serious officers, the
ruddy-faced men, and the then untried guns of the glorious Seventh
Division, on their route marches, with fife and drum to cheer the way
with the now classic strains of "It's a long, long way to Tipperary."
There are spots where I met them in the autumn of 1914 that I never
pass without feeling that for all time these places are sacred to the
memory of heroes.

Besides the fancied pageantry of the roads there are the natural
objects of the woods, the lanes, and the fields; the blossoming
hawthorn and the wild roses trailing from the hedges, the hares and
rabbits, the birds, the butterflies, and the flowers; sturdy teams
with the time-honoured ploughs and harrows, the sowing of the seed,
the young gleaming corn, the scented hayfields or the golden harvest;
every man at his honourable labour, happy children dashing out of
school; noble timber, hazel coppices, grey old villages; cattle in the
pastures, or enjoying the cool waters of shallow pools or brooks;
sheep in the field or the fold, the shepherd and his dog; apple
blossom, or the ripe and ruddy fruit, bowery hop-gardens, mellow old
cottages, country-folk going to market, fat beasts, cows and calves,
carriers' carts full of gossips.

Pictures, real pictures, everywhere, endless in variety. Steady! go
steady past these woods; see the blue haze of