Come, my Corinna, come, and coming, mark How each field turns a street, each street a park Made green and trimmed with trees; see how Devotion gives each house a bough Or branch; each porch, each door, on this An ark, a tabernacle is Made up of white thorn neatly interwoven. It was the prettiest festival in the world. In every parish they raised a May-pole hung with garlands and ribbons; they elected a Queen of the May, and they danced and sang about their pole. The London parishes vied with each other in the height and splendor of the pole. One was kept in Gerrard's Hall, Basing Lane (now swept away by the new streets). This was forty feet high. A much later one, erected in the Strand, 1661, in defiance to the Puritans, was 130 feet high. And there was the famous May-pole of St. Andrews Under-shaft, destroyed by the Puritans as an emblem of idolatry and profligacy. The girls came back from their quest of flowers singing, but not quite in these words: We have been rambling all the night, And almost all the day, And now returning back again We have brought you a branch of May. A branch of May we have brought you, And at your door it stands; It is but a sprout, but it's well budded out, By the work of our Lord's hands. And there was morris-dancing, with Robin Hood, Friar Tuck, Little John, Tom the Piper, and Tom the Fool, with hobby-horses, pipe and tabor, mummers and devils, and I know not what; and Chepe and Cornhill and Gracechurch Street were transformed into leafy lanes and woodland ways and alleys cut through hawthorn and wild rose. You may see to-day the hawthorn and the wild rose growing in Epping Forest, just as they grew four hundred years ago. But the forest has been miserably curtailed of its proportions. A great slice, wedge-shaped, has been cut out bodily, and is now built upon. Hainault Forest has perished these forty years, and is converted into farms, save for a fragment, and of Middlesex Forest nothing remains except the little piece enclosed in Lord Mansfield's park. But in those days the forest came down to the hamlet of Iseldun, afterwards Merry Islington. And in the month of June there were the burning of bonfires to clear and cleanse the air, and the marching of the watch on the vigils of St. John Baptist and St. Peter. Hear the testimony of Stow: