There was a curious legend that long prevailed in country districts, that the cuckoo of summer turned into a sparrow-hawk in winter, and back again into a cuckoo in the spring. On 21st August 1895, there was the rare appearance of “a cuckoo flying up and down a London street, bewildered, sheltering in its limes.” It is excellent news that a kingfisher was recently watched flying over the Serpentine, though it is too much to hope that the bird of brilliant plumage will ever leave its favourite solitudes for the streams of the town. Bats haunt the parks in the dusk of night. “There is at least one tree in Kensington Gardens,” says Mr. Digby Pigott, “an old hollow oak between the refreshment-room and the gardener’s cottage,—which is the home of a considerable colony of bats. A note was made of the exact hour at which the long silent procession left the hole one evening in August. The next day, within four minutes of the same time—the time was carefully taken—seventeen bats crawled up, and with the same regular intervals took headers into the dusk, to appear again as if they had started from another quarter altogether, careering about over the tops of the trees, doing the best they could to prevent too great an increase of humbler London night fliers.” It seems that we have not yet realised the full uses to which the parks might be put. Many people have their own ideas, and the authorities are constantly being bombarded with applications from one person or another, who desires to have a portion of the Park given over to his—or more frequently her—particular purposes. One good lady, representing a Woman’s Temperance Society, wished to have a bandstand handed over to her when not occupied by the musicians, for meetings “for the public good.” Requests have been made by charitable agencies, that the parks might be utilised to provide special sleeping accommodation for the unemployed. A novelty in horrors was suggested by an application to hold a “Gramophone Gospel Service.” A gentleman wanted a pond filled in because his wife had been stung by an insect, and he was afraid of malaria; while a lady wished to use one of the ornamental waters to exercise her ducklings. A finer imagination still was displayed by a noble lord, who directed his secretary to write asking for the use of the York Water Gate, now half buried in Embankment Gardens, as a smoking-room. CHAPTER XIV THE EVOLUTION OF THE CARRIAGE Such a reformation in vehicular traffic has taken place in Hyde Park in the first years of the twentieth century, that it seems worth tracing roughly the means of progression from the Roman car of two thousand years ago to the electric landaulette of to-day, and from the pack-horse to the snorting motor cycles.