When a working-class American wants a holiday—and sometimes when he would rather stay at home—he sets out with his wife and family for the nearest park. In England, of course, a park means, for the working classes at any rate, a somewhat decorous and over-laid-out open space where there is a band-stand, a range of concrete promenades, a Swiss châlet where bad tea is provided, a policeman, and a number of hard seats. In America, however, the park is an entirely different affair. It is always a place in which you can buy pea-nuts. Not only so; it is a place in which the benevolent American entrepreneurs throw together aggregations of “attractions” such as are to be seen nowhere else on sea or land. I find, for example, that for Cream City Park, Lyons, Ill., the following amusement devices are to be provided during this present summer:— “Old Mill, Merry-Go-Rounds, Penny Arcade, Circular Swing, Cave of the Winds, Billiard and Pool Parlours, Jap Ping-Pong Parlour, Cane Rack, Baby Rack, Illusion Shows, Baby Incubator, Pony Track, Razzle-Dazzle, and ‘other novelties.’ There are also to be Japanese Tea Gardens, Ice Cream Stands, Soft Drink Stands, Candy and Pop Corn Stands, and facilities for the sale of pea-nuts.” Another of these parks at Aldoc Beach, near Buffalo, is described as “running seven days a week” and as possessing “the most magnificent Pine Grove and Great Lake,” together with “a $100,000 Summer Hotel, a $15,000 Figure Eight, a $5,000 Rustic Vaudeville Theatre, and a $5,000 Dance Pavilion,” in addition to a Blinding Array of Restaurants, Chubbuck Wheels, Houses of Mirth, Box-Ball Alleys, Shooting Galleries, Circle Swings, and Stands for the sale of Soft Drinks, Tobaccos, Sandwiches, Ice Creams, Frankfurters—and pea-nuts. There are literally thousands of these parks scattered throughout the United States, and at all and each of them roaring provision is made for the people’s enjoyment. Compared with our English parks, with their sad, uncertain County Council bands, they fire the imagination. Practically they represent the old English fair—which the drab English authorities have so ruthlessly stamped out—very much modernised, Americanised, and “notionised.” Here the pea-nut reigns supreme. You chew it on the Razzle-Dazzle and in the Baby Rack and the Old Mill and the House of Mirth and the Chubbuck Wheel, and even in the $15,000 Figure Eight and the $5,000 Rustic Vaudeville. It is pea-nuts, pea-nuts, pea-nuts all the time, and nobody hopes, and nobody has the least desire to get away from them—from pea-nuts. Now, as the parks are open throughout the year and run seven days a week, and are all situated within easy distance of large centres of population, it follows that the consumption of pea-nuts in America is something enormous. If the yearly supply were to be put into trucks and looped up into a procession, it would probably take that procession 368 days to pass a given point.