large parish of Kingsclere, there is a little hamlet named Ashford Hill, the modern church of St. Paul, Woodlands, pretty cottages with pleasant gardens, a village inn, and a dissenting chapel.  The churchyard is full of graves, and a cemetery has been lately added.  This pretty valley with its homes and church and chapel is a doomed valley.  In a few years time if a former resident returns home from Australia or America to his native village he will find his old cottage gone from the light of the sun and buried beneath the still waters of a huge lake.  It is almost certain that such will be the case with this secluded rural scene.  The eyes of Londoners have turned upon the doomed valley.  They need water, and water must somehow be procured.  The great city has no pity.  The church and the village will have to be removed.  It is all very sad.  As a writer in a London paper says:  “Under the best of conditions it is impossible to think of such an eviction without sympathy for the grief that it must surely cause to some.  The younger residents may contemplate it cheerfully enough; but for the elder folk, who have spent lives of sunshine and shade, toil, sorrow, joy, in this peaceful vale, it must needs be that the removal will bring a regret not to be lightly uttered in words.  The soul of man clings to the localities that he has known and loved; perhaps, as in Wales, there will be some broken hearts when the water flows in upon the scenes where men and women have met and loved and wedded, where children have been born, where the beloved dead have been laid to rest.”

The old forests are not safe.  The Act of 1851 caused the destruction of miles of beautiful landscape.  Peacock, in his story of Gryll Grange, makes the announcement that the New Forest is now enclosed, and that he proposes never to visit it again.  Twenty-five years of ruthless devastation followed the passing of that Act.  The deer disappeared.  Stretches of open beechwood and green lawns broken by thickets of ancient thorn and holly vanished under the official axe.  Woods and lawns were cleared and replaced by miles and miles of rectangular fir plantations.  The Act of 1876 with regard to forest land came late, but it, happily, saved some spots of sylvan beauty.  Under the Act of 1851 all that was ancient and delightful to the eye would have been levelled, or hidden in fir-wood.  The later Act stopped this wholesale destruction.  We have still some lofty woods, still some scenery that shows how England looked when it was a land of blowing woodland.  The New Forest is maimed and scarred, but what is left is precious and unique.  It is primeval forest land, nearly all that remains in the country.  Are these treasures safe?  Under the Act of 1876 managers are told to consider beauty as well as profit, and to abstain from destroying ancient trees; but much is left to the decision and to the judgment of officials, and they are not always to be depended on.