It is what in these parts we call a holm, a grove of oaks with a thick underwood of hollies grown into weird shapes with frequent cutting. Here and there is an aged thorn which has attained almost the size and girth of a forest tree, and in places Scotch firs lift their stately heads. In their tops the sea-sound murmurs, and about them is the hot fragrance the sun draws out of their resinous branches mingling with the tanny odour of the bracken. An alley through hollies meeting overhead is like a tunnel; it issues on a broad sunny level where four roads meet, each beckoning so enticingly, one is fain to sit down awhile to weigh their claims. One source of the peculiar loveliness of such a holm is that all the ways are green. The grass will flourish under oaks and hollies while it perishes under the beech, and where the fir trees stand, their roots are shrouded in bracken which in summer takes up the tale of greenness, and when October frosts come lights up the ways with gold.
It is a long coppice, and so strangely shaped that it is possible to make endless wanderings, and even to achieve the losing of one's way, till dusk falls and the owls are hooting to each other from upland to covert, and along the moonlit border of the wood the nightjar is churring with tumbling flight.
One thing only mars the harmony: over against a tumbledown thatched cottage a pert, shallow erection in reddest of red brick and shiniest of slate hideously obtrudes itself on the greenness. Yet the story of it is not without pathos. An old labourer, who had never earned more than fifteen shillings a week, saved and saved till he could buy the old cottage and build the new one in the pride of his heart.
Big village or little country town, as it may be regarded, Lyndhurst is not only the centre but the veritable capital of the district; for here, at the top of the steep street, stands the King's House, still the seat of government, and now inhabited by the Deputy Surveyor, who succeeded to the position of the Lord Warden. There is little of the palace of kings about the house, a solid and dignified yet homely structure standing close upon the pavement. It was built by Charles II on the site of an earlier one where his father often stayed for a few days' sport. It was from here, no doubt, that Charles Louis, the young exiled Elector Palatine, wrote to his mother of accompanying his uncle on a hunting excursion, and dated his letter "Lindust". Of late it has rarely been the residence of royalty. When George III on his way to his beloved Weymouth broke his journey, he was wont to stay at Cuffnells, with its wide park and its glory of rhododendrons, as the guest of Mr. George Rose, the friend of Pitt. But he seems to have honoured the King's House on one occasion.