Where the grounds of Buckingham Palace now extend, there stood in the seventeenth century the old flowery pleasaunce known as Mulberry Garden, a place long appropriated, like its Spring prototype at Whitehall, to _al fresco_ entertainment. Ex-mural and mural as things then went, there was to the ordinary cit a _soupçon_ of adventure suggested in a visit to this remoter fairyland; and, as a little enterprising beyond the confines of the orthodox adds a zest to the soberest merry-making, Mulberry Garden possessed an attraction for the town, which was certainly due as much to its comparative removedness as to any diversions it might offer in the way of dancing and junketing. There was a mild thrill in achieving it, its wild and tangled acres, only gathered into cores of brilliancy at certain definite centres, where, after dark, the scattered threads of lamps, like gossamer hung with dew-drops, constellated thickly about groups of arbours, set in open spaces among the trees, where glittering forms circulated, and laughter rang, and cheese-cakes were eaten and lips kissed under fragrant ambushes of boughs woven into a thousand pretty devices of green garters and lovers’ knots. There was here none of the structural artifices which later came to vulgarize, and, alas! popularize, the more ordered vistas of Vauxhall across the water--cascades, and sham ruins, and side shows, and so forth; but Nature was allowed for the most part her own sweet, untrammelled way; and, where the wildernesses _were_ converted, it was to no more than an artless religion of green swards and bowers, whereon and wherein the tripping frolic of foot and heart might adapt itself, if it would, to “the music of the moon” and the song of the innocent nightingale. Not that to those chaste warblers of the night was entrusted the whole provision of music for the company. Skies might be moonless, and birds silent or out of season; wherefore there was generally to be found engaged to the service of romantic hearts and ears some performer, skilled on lute or harp, whose melodious utterances, thrilling through grove and clearing, were calculated to awaken such emotions as were compatible with the sweet understanding of sylvan solitudes. Now, that is a true picture, though very certainly a one-sided. For where innocence goes sin is sure to follow; and the atmosphere of Mulberry Garden was by no means all of harmless frolic compact. Being relatively remote, and consisting, moreover, for three-fourths of its space of unredeemed wilderness, it formed a tempting rendezvous for spirits kept better apart; and too often, it must be confessed, a meeting among its waste thickets was tantamount to an intrigue. Still, in its popular centres the whole may be said to have leavened the parts, and it was to those, nominally, that the town gravitated, and in them found its entertainment.