How boundless are the opportunities of Kensington Gardens--the Round Pond, the winding Serpentine, the mysterious seclusion of the Dutch brick Palace! Genii swarm there. One jostles possibilities. It is a land of romance, bounded on the north by the Abyss of Bayswater, and on the south by the Amphitheatre of the Albert Hall. But for a centre of adventure I choose the Long Walk; it beckoned me somewhat as the North-West Passage beckoned my seafaring ancestors--the buccaneering mariners of Elizabethan Devon. I sat down on a chair at the foot of an old elm with a poetic hollow, prosaically filled by a utilitarian plate of galvanised iron. Two ancient ladies were seated on the other side already--very grand-looking dames, with the haughty and exclusive ugliness of the English aristocracy in its later stages. For frank hideousness, commend me to the noble dowager. They were talking confidentially as I sat down; the trifling episode of my approach did not suffice to stem the full stream of their conversation. The great ignore the intrusion of their inferiors. [Illustration: OUI, MADAME; MERCI BEAUCOUP, MADAME.] 'Yes, it's a terrible nuisance,' the eldest and ugliest of the two observed--she was a high-born lady, with a distinctly cantankerous cast of countenance. She had a Roman nose, and her skin was wrinkled like a wilted apple; she wore coffee-coloured point-lace in her bonnet, with a complexion to match. 'But what could I do, my dear? I simply _couldn't_ put up with such insolence. So I looked her straight back in the face--oh, she quailed, I can tell you; and I said to her, in my iciest voice--you know how icy I can be when occasion demands it'--the second old lady nodded an ungrudging assent, as if perfectly prepared to admit her friend's rare gift of iciness--'I said to her, "Celestine, you can take your month's wages, and half an hour to get out of this house." And she dropped me a deep reverence, and she answered: "_Oui, madame; merci beaucoup, madame; je ne desire pas mieux, madame._" And out she flounced. So there was the end of it.' 'Still, you go to Schlangenbad on Monday?'