Punch (57.1869)

September 18, 1869.1 PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI. 105

"UNIFORM, BUT IRREGULAR."

If they could only Sort all their Men and Horses, how much better the Bucksbridge Yeomanry would Look !

CAUTION TO TRESPASSERS!

{By our Clod-hopping Correspondent)

My Drar Mr. Punch,

The other day, being Sunday, your servant and three com-
panions, a respectable solicitor ai d his two children, were ordered by a
seeming under-keeper, accompanied by two other cads, out of Nightin-
gale Wood.

Nightingale Wood is a wood lying between Southampton and
Romsey._ Derives its name, of course, from being fall of nightingales
in the nightingale season. Might have been called Primrose Wood
instead,_ with equal reason. Abounds in various other flowers and
yjlants, including lilies of the valley and Solomon's Seal. Is traversed
by grassy walks bordered with chesnuts and hazel. Communicates
with the highway by open gates not barred. Has been, from time
immemorial, open by gracious permission to rural ramblers.

Your Commissioner, when informed that he and his associates were
trespassing, was dancing jauntingly down a hill, bearing in his hand a
large bunch of the herb eyebright, and might, if he had only had
spectacles on, have been taken for a regular Professor. He did not
look like a poacher, at any rate. But one of the keeper's concomitant
cads did.

The principal cad, the keeper, said that he had orders from the
proprietor of the property to exclude all persons from the wood.
Your Commissioner does not for a moment believe any gentleman
capable of cutting off his neighbours, and the harmless stroller,
bntaniser, or toadstool-hunter, and the children in the purlieus of
Broadlands, from their ancient privilege of access to Nightingale
Wood. He believes that the cad who accosted him as a trespasser,
was, in so doing, simply trying it on with a view to a "tip "—which
he missed.

Let the exclusion of your Commissioner from Nightingale Wood, by
an officious if not a rapacious cad, pass. But there are other cads,
who, without doubt do represent their employers, and represent them
thoroughly, by whom the pedestrian has lately become liable to be
ordered out of woodlands and solitudes which in time past he was free

to roam at large. In wood, coppice, and wild, where for ages there
had been free leave of pathway, wayfarers are now almost everywhere
confronted with a horrid board, reared on a post, and inscribed with
an execrable "Caution to Trespassers." Which structure your Com-
missioner would gladly see converted into a gallows, with the churl
who reared it hanging thereon.

By the way, no notice-board warns people out of Nightingale
Wood.

You, Mr. Punch, are aware that the brutes now fast closing the
sylvan scenery of England to Englishmen, are with the exception of
an ignoble Duke or two, rich rogues of speculators and financiers,
who have ousted the old territorial aristocrats and 'squires, having
bought fields and forests with the reward of their rascality.

" Haven't I a right to do what I like with my own ? " demands the
exclusive Proprietor. Oh yes, Curmudgeon. I am answering a Snob
and a Philistine, not Mr. Punch. Oh yes, Niggard. You have a
perfect right to curtail people of an indulgence they have only enjoyed
on sufferance. You have an undeniable right to deny them the vision,
even, of your Paradise. And they have a right to do what they like
with their own too. They have a right to vote for whom they will.
The rights of property rest on common consent. Did you never hear
any thing about a certain cry of Communism ? If you want to provoke
it, pursue your present course of excluding your less fortunate fellow
citizens from domains which they have been accustomed to range as
commons. And then that cry will be joined, and swelled, and helped
as much as possible to become law by men who, enthusiastic upholders
of a landed gentry, would, if they could, abolish landed Snobs.

Nobody, Mr. Punch, can be a more thorough well-wisher to your
landed gentry—observe, Gentry, not Snobs—than, my dear Mr. Punch,

Your ever faithful Commissioner,

Hobnail.

Information Wanted.

Will some one explain how it happens that, though wheat falls,
bread continues to "rise ? " We have dipped into Yeast, but can find
no solution of this puzzle there.

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