imagination with historic visions from the earliest times. There are
the ancient camps, now silent and deserted, which become at the
bidding of fancy peopled with the unkempt and savage British, and
later with their well-disciplined and well-equipped Roman conquerers:
archers and men in armour appear; pilgrims' processions such as we
read of in Chaucer; knights and ladies on their stately steeds. There
are the ghosts of royal progresses, kings and queens, and wonderful
pageantry gorgeous in array; decorously ambling cardinals and abbots
with their trains of servitors; hawking parties with hawks and
attendants; soldiers after Sedgemoor in pursuit of Monmouth's
ill-fated followers; George IV. and his gay courtiers on the Brighton
road; beaux and beauties in their well-appointed carriages bound for
Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, or Bath; splendid 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.