to them. One gentleman who has lived amongst them thirty years assures me that he has never received a rude answer but once, and that was from a stranger.
Much, no doubt, has been done by the schools with which the Forest is well supplied. Probably, too, it is they who have driven the old superstitions away, and scattered the mental twilight which for so many ages pervaded these leafy solitudes. Nevertheless, we are assured by Mr Wise, who has made the subject his study, these superstitions still exist, but are rarely alluded to, for fear of ridicule.
Nothing perhaps gives one a better idea of the habits of mind of these "rude forefathers of the" Forest "hamlet," than such a catalogue as he has collected of these weird fancies. Handed down from generation to generation, they were so numerous as to form a rule of life, meeting the unhappy peasant at every step, haunting and terrifying his mind, and driving him into a baseless fatalism, and at times to a sort of devil-worship.
But perhaps the most peculiar custom in the Forest is the great squirrel-hunt, which takes place the day after Christmas. Twenty or thirty men and boys form themselves into a company, and, armed with leaded sticks, called "scales" or "squoyles," go out into the Forest. Directly they see a squirrel, away go the sticks, until the poor creature, bewildered and frightened, is fain to descend, and then is soon killed. When they have caught a sufficient number they put them into a great pie, which is eaten at a feast they hold at some public-house.
No one is so sententious as the peasant. He likes his wit and his wisdom done up in small bundles easy to carry and ready for use. Thus the concentrated experience of every district compacts itself into some proverbial expression. These two proverbs, "A good bark year makes a good wheat year," "To rattle like a boar in a holmebush," are evidently of Forest origin. "A poor dry thing, let it go," smacks of the poacher. "He won't climb up May Hill" tells the sad end of many a poor wood-cutter, daily wet with autumnal mists and the malific miasma, which must ever float about the undrained morasses of the Forest. A villainous historical memory is for ever pilloried in the proverb, "As bad as Jeffreys"; while the reproof to greediness contained in another is
