compared with former years, praised or criticised, such is the eager interest of those who crowd to take their turn for a peep. It is delightful to watch the pleasure on all faces, as a whole family out for their Sunday walk, press in together. It is only one more instance of the joy the London Parks bring to millions of lives. The world of fashion has only attacked Battersea Park spasmodically. When it was new, and the sub-tropical garden a rarity, people drove out from Mayfair or Belgravia to see it. Again Battersea became the fashion when the cycling craze began. In the summer of 1895 it suddenly became “the thing” to bicycle to breakfast in Battersea Park, and ladies who had never before visited this South London Park flocked there in the early mornings. It was away from the traffic that disturbed the beginner in Hyde or St. James’s Park, and perhaps the daring originality of cycling seemed to demand that conventions should further be violated; and nothing so commonplace as Hyde Park would satisfy the aspirations of the newly-emancipated lady cyclists. What would their ancestors, who had paced the Mall in powder and crinolines, have said to the short-skirted, energetic young or even elderly cyclist? No doubt some of that language which shocks modern ears, used by the heroines in “Sir Charles Grandison,” would have been found equal to the occasion. The great cycling rage is over, and Battersea is again deserted by fair beings, who now prefer to fly further afield in motors, but the Park is just as crowded by those for whose benefit it was really made--the ever-growing population of London south of the river. VAUXHALL PARK Going east from Battersea the next Park is Vauxhall, a small oasis of green in a crowded district. Although only 8 acres in extent, it is a great boon to the neighbourhood, and hundreds of children play there every day. It has been open since 1891, the land, occupied by houses with gardens, having been acquired and the houses demolished, and the little Park is owned and kept up by Lambeth Borough Council. It has nothing to do with the famous Vauxhall Gardens, to which the rank and fashion of the town flocked for nearly two hundred years; and the country visitor to Vauxhall Park could hardly speak of it in such glowing terms as Farmer Colin to his wife in 1741 of the famous Vauxhall Spring Gardens:-- “O Mary! soft in feature, I’ve been at dear Vauxhall; No paradise is sweeter, Not that they Eden call. “Methought, when first I entered, Such splendours round me shone, Into a world I ventured Where rose another sun.”