Page:White - The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.djvu/36

 them: for the snow lay where the drain had more than four feet depth of earth over it. It continued also to lie on thatch, dies, and the tops of walls.' See Hales's Haemastatics, p. 360. Quaere.-- Might not such observations be reduced to domestic use, by promoting the discovery of old obliterated drains and wells about houses; and in Roman stations and camps lead to the finding of pavements, baths and graves, and other hidden relics of curious antiquity ?)

This lonely domain is a very agreeable haunt for many sorts of wild fowls, which not only frequent it in the winter, but breed there in the summer; such as lapwings, snipes, wild-ducks, and, as I have discovered within these few years, teals. Partridges in vast plenty are bred in good seasons on the verge of this forest, into which they love to make excursions: and in particular, in the dry summer of 1740 and 1741, and some years after, they swarmed to such a degree, that parties of unreasonable sportsmen killed twenty and sometimes thirty brace in a day.

But there was a nobler species of game in this forest, now extinct, which I have heard old people say abounded much before shooting flying became so common, and that was the heath-cock, black- game, or grouse. When I was a little boy I recollect one coming now and then to my father's table. The last pack remembered was killed about thirty-five years ago; and within these ten years one solitary greyhen was sprung by some beagles in beating for a hare. The sportsmen cried out, 'A hen pheasant'; but a gentleman present, who had often seen grouse in the north of England, assured me that it was a greyhen.

Nor does the loss of our black game prove the only gap in the Fauna Selborniensis; for another beautiful link in the chain of