The gardens are at the back of the inn, and though summer is the real time to enjoy the attractions of the arbours at the Bull and Bush, it is quite pleasant when the new leaves are covering, in the spring, the trees with the lightest green, or on a still, autumn day when the tints around the lawn are all russet and copper, to drink tea on the little terrace behind the house in the centre of which is a great stone vase for flowers and at which little tables with red and white and yellow and white covers are set for the tea-drinkers. The tea is excellent, and though the slices of bread and butter are thick they are of fine bread and the freshest of butter. When spring merges into summer the green bowling lawn, with turf as thick and level as a carpet, also has its quota of cane chairs and little tables, and the rustic arbours all around it, on the roofs of which are boxes of flowers, are also all occupied. The waiters are kept busy carrying cakes and bread and butter and tea and stronger beverages all through a summer day to the little family parties who take their ease in the garden of their inn. As a neighbour to the bowling-green is the platform which serves as an out-of-door dancing floor when Cinderellas are held on summer evenings, and as the flooring on which the chairs are put when a concert is given on a little stage which is to one side of this planked space. In the middle of this dancing and theatre floor is the circle of firs which bears Hogarth's name. There are electric lights on the terrace and amidst the trees and round the lawn and dancing floor. Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays are the days on which the concerts or the dances are generally held in summer. Mr Fred Vinall, short in stature, genial in manner, with close-clipped grey beard and moustache, has just as distinguished friends amongst players and artists and men of the pen as any of his predecessors. He has revived the old pleasures of the tea-gardens of a hundred years ago, and to see the gardens of the Bull and Bush on a warm summer evening is to learn that Londoners can take their evening pleasures out of doors with cheerful mirth and with sobriety as well. And now at last I come to the reason why the Bull and Bush should be recommended to gourmets not only as a place where Londoners can be seen amusing themselves sanely, but as a place of excellent eating. Mrs Vinall, wife of the host of the old inn, Belgian by birth, has all the talent of a Cordon Bleu, and if warning is telegraphed or written to the inn of the coming of a party of gourmets, a lunch or a dinner, admirably cooked under Mrs Vinall's supervision, will be ready for the gastronomers, the table set in the open air, and they will, I am sure, eating in the invigorating air of Hampstead Heath food admirably cooked, thank me for having told them of a lunching and dining place clear of the London smoke. XXXII THE BERKELEY