Oh, London! beautiful London! who would not be with thee in May? Paris should not, surely, be recommended as the only Mecca of that lovely month. When the London street authorities, with unwonted forbearance, have for one brief moment suspended their incessant repairing of the busiest thoroughfares; when the hanging gardens of Park Lane, and the window-boxes of Seven Dials, alike display their "pavilions of tender green"; when Piccadilly is blocked with traffic; when Rotten Row is thronged with the smart world; when the shops hang out their daintiest spring fashions; when the gay parterres of the Parks show flowers of kaleidoscopic brilliance, and their sylvan seclusions suggest the "real country," what can be more delightful than our own often-maligned metropolis? The Parks of London are, perhaps, the element that most surprises the foreigner unused to English tastes and ways. Here are neither the leafy terraces and regular alleys of German capitals, nor the trim well-clipped boscages and levels of Versailles and the Tuileries; but only mere stretches of park-like greensward, dotted here and there, in charming irregularity, with old trees of noble girth. Walks there are, indeed, and footpaths, shrubberies, and flower-beds; but the chief area of the London Parks is, ever and always, this fresh, radiant, undulating turf, turf which here, more than ever, suggests the little Board School girl's answer to a question on general knowledge: "Turf, ma'am, is grass and clean dirt put together by God." Of Hyde Park, the largest and oldest of the London Parks, Disraeli said truly in one of his novels: "Hyde Park has still about it something of Arcadia. There are woods and waters, and the occasional illusion of an illimitable distance of sylvan joyance." The history of Hyde Park is the history, generally, of Greater London; first monastery grounds, then royal demesne, then again, the people's. Some of the old trees may even have seen the ancient manor of Hyde; some of them must certainly recall the time when this was a royal Tudor hunting-ground, well-stocked with deer. Many of its fine old timber-trees have, however, disappeared, so that the famous "Ring" of Charles II.'s time can be now but imperfectly traced.