Those persons to whom London is a home--a place to be lived in all the year round, save on the occasion of the two months' holiday, when one rushes off to the North, or to the sea, or to the Continent, returning with a renewed stock of health, and a pleasurable sense of having enjoyed yourself, but with a still more pleasurable sense of being back again in town--are very much amused at a notion prevalent amongst many worthy people who arrive at their own or at a hired house in the month of March, stay there till the end of the month of June, and go away fancying that they know London. Know London! A lifetime's earnest devotion does not suffice for that study, and those people who talk thus have not even the merest smattering of its topography. Their London used to be bounded on the west by the Knightsbridge Barracks--even now they acknowledge nothing beyond Princes Terrace. On the south-west they have penetrated as far as Onslow Square; the territory beyond that might be full of tiger-lairs and hiding-places for dragons, for all they know about it. Of the suburbs, beyond such knowledge as they derive from an occasional visit to the Star and Garter at Richmond, they know absolutely nothing. They do not know, and it would not make the smallest difference to them if they did, that if, instead of cantering up and down that ghastly, treeless, sun-scorched mile of gravel, the Row, they chose to turn their horses' heads north-westward, they could find shade in the green Willesden lanes and air on the breezy Hendon heights. They do not know that within a very short distance of Hyde Park there are shady lanes half hidden in greenery, dotted here and there with quaint old-fashioned houses standing in the midst of large grounds--some with gardens sloping away towards the river; others with enormous trees overhanging them, blotting out all view or vista; and others again with such an expanse of what the auctioneers are pleased to term "park-like grounds" visible from their windows, that you would have no idea of the immediate proximity of London, save for the never-varying presence of the smoke-wreath hanging over the horizon, and the never-ceasing, save on Sundays, dull rumble of distant traffic, which grinds on the ear like the monotonous surging of the waves upon the shore.