London kept it in later days in a fashion of its own. Until within the nineteenth century it continued to be the festival of milkmaids and chimney-sweeps. A cow, much garlanded with flowers, was led by dairy women in light, fantastic dresses, and wreathed with flowers, who would dance round it, playing on musical instruments. Some of them used to polish up their tin cans, others used to hire silver articles from pawnbrokers at so much an hour. These used to be hung upon a frame which went over a man’s head and shoulders, only his legs being visible, and as he joined the dance, he was a somewhat comical apparition. The sweeps were the last to keep up May Day in the Metropolis. A band of them in character dress marched round the streets until the middle of the century, accompanied by a man concealed in a huge flower-be-trimmed frame, with a flag at the top, and known as “Jack-in-the-Green.” This march was interrupted at times by dances to a fife-and-drum accompaniment. Of course, the Act forbidding the employment of boys and men for climbing chimneys, reduced the numbers of these chimney-sweepers, and that as much as anything led to the abolishment of their festival. During her residence in Portman Square, Mrs. Montagu annually entertained the chimney-sweeps on May Day. An old superstition that washing the face with dew on May Day was beneficial to the complexion, existed to the end of the eighteenth century. Mrs. Pepys on various occasions rose at four o’clock in the morning—and once at three—to go and wash her face in the renowned May dew—so her husband records. To the restored May-Day scene in Hyde Park came Cromwell, then Lord Protector, and many of his Privy Councillors—strange figures for such company. It is told of the Protector that he looked on with keen enjoyment at a hurling-match. The game is described as “a bowling of a great ball of fifty Cornish gentlemen of one side and fifty of the other; one party with red caps, and the other in white. The ball they played withal was silver, and designed for that party which did win the goal.” The ancient game, from which Hurlingham, now famous for its fashion and its sports, takes its name, is still played each year at Newquay, in Cornwall. In a “Letter from John Barber to Mr. Scudamore,” dated “London, 2 Maij, 1654,” the following account of the scene is given: