Down on rugged and untamed Blackheath the band is playing at “The Point,” and in all that region where Wat Tyler and Jack Cade stirred Kent to rebellion the talk is now of London docks and the latest scores of the golfers.
Up at airy Victoria Park the swans in the ponds and the chaffinches in the hawthorn bushes are performing to enthusiastic audiences, and the Gothic Temple of the Victoria Fountain is rimmed with rough gallants and the “Sallies of their Alleys” who betray no inclination to “attempt from Love’s sickness to fly.”
The cyclists are foregathered at picturesque Battersea Park and chatting with their sweethearts over tea in the refreshment rooms, while hundreds of unemployed who can afford neither bicycle, sweetheart, nor tea gaze gloomily on the gorgeous blooms of the sub-tropical garden, loll over the balustrade of the long Thames embankment, and end up by sprawling face down on the grass or dozing fitfully on the benches.
Perhaps the largest outpouring of all is at ever popular Regent’s Park, preferred by the substantial middle-class,—long noted, like George I, for virtues rather than accomplishments. Doubtless they are now rambling through the Zoo, exploring the Botanic Gardens where flowered borders and large stone urns are spilling over with brilliant color, watching the driving in the “Outer Circle,” or swelling the throng on the long Board Walk. Hundreds on these shady acres are taking their ease with all the unction of Arden:—
“Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me,
And tune his merry note,
Unto the sweet bird’s throat.”
In all probability tremendous admiration is being expressed at aristocratic Hyde Park, as usual, for the broad reaches of velvety turf and the venerable oaks and elms. More than one will indulge a pleasant reverie over the dead and gone who have braved it there—Pepys in his new yellow coach, dainty ladies in powder and patches flashing sparkling eyes on the gallants, and the scented, unhappy beaux who have sighed with Shenstone along these allées:
“When forced from dear Hebe to go