Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/199

Rh room had been converted into a fuel-house, and his wife had laid in a stock of provisions. The storm still increased. The straggling hedges were soon covered; and by-and-by the woods themselves disappeared. After a week's snow, a heavy frost followed. The snow hardened. People went out shooting, and wherever a breathing-hole in the snow appeared, fired, and nearly always killed a hare. The snow continued on the ground for seven weeks; and when it melted, the stiffened bodies of horses and deer covered the plains.

And now for a few of the Forest words and expressions, many of which are very peculiar. Take, for instance, the term "shade," which here has nothing in common with the shadows of the woods, but means either a pool or an open piece of ground, generally on a hill top, where the cattle in the warm weather collect, or, as the phrase is, "come to shade," for the sake of the water in the one and the breeze in the other. Thus "Ober Shade" means nothing more than Ober pond; whilst "Stony Cross Shade" is a mere turfy plot. At times as many as a hundred cows or horses are collected together in one of these places, where the owners, or "Forest marksmen," always first go to look after a strayed animal. Nearly every "Walk" in the Forest has its own "Shade," called after its own name, and we find the term used as far back as a perambulation of the Forest in the twenty-second year of Charles II., where is mentioned "the Green Shade of Biericombe or Bircombe."

It affords a good illustration of how words grow in their 181