the present, till I enter professedly on my series of
letters respecting the more remote history of this village and district.

LETTER IX.

By way of supplement, I shall trouble you once more on this subject, to
inform you that Wolmer, with her sister forest Ayles Holt, _alias_ Alice
Holt, as it is called in old records, is held by grant from the crown for
a term of years.

The grantees that the author remembers are Brigadier-General Emanuel
Scroope Howe, and his lady, Ruperta, who was a natural daughter of Prince
Rupert by Margaret Hughes; a Mr. Mordaunt, of the Peterborough family,
who married a dowager Lady Pembroke; Henry Bilson Legge and lady; and now
Lord Stawell, their son.

The lady of General Howe lived to an advanced age, long surviving her
husband, and, at her death, left behind her many curious pieces of
mechanism of her father's constructing, who was a distinguished mechanic
and artist, as well as warrior; and among the rest, a very complicated
clock, lately in possession of Mr. Elmer, the celebrated game painter, at
Farnham, in the county of Surrey.

Though these two forests are only parted by a narrow range of enclosures,
yet no two soils can be more different; for the Holt consists of a strong
loam, of a miry nature, carrying a good turf, and abounding with oaks
that grow to be large timber; while Wolmer is nothing but a hungry,
sandy, barren waste. The former being all in the parish of Binsted, is
about two miles in extent from north to south, and near as much from east
to west, and contains within it many woodlands and lawns, and the great
lodge where the grantees reside, and a smaller lodge called Goose Green;
and is abutted on by the parishes of Kingsley, Frinsham, Farnham, and
Bentley; all of which have right of common.

One thing is remarkable, that though the Holt has been of old well
stocked with fallow-deer, unrestrained by any pales or fences more than a
common hedge, yet they were never seen within the limits of Wolmer; nor
were the red deer of Wolmer ever known to haunt the thickets or glades of
the Holt.

At present the deer of the Holt are much thinned and reduced by the night
hunters, who perpetually harass them in spite of the efforts of numerous
keepers, and the severe penalties that have been put in force against
them as often as they have been detected, and rendered liable to the lash
of the law. Neither fines nor imprisonments can deter them, so
impossible is it to ext