As I was curious to see whether a little dinner at the Hyde Park Hotel was as well cooked as the great banquets are in that flourishing establishment, I asked them to dine there with me one Sunday evening, and gave Mr Kerpen, the manager of the hotel, warning of our coming, asking him to suggest to M. Müller, the _chef de cuisine_, that I should like one or two specialities of his kitchen included in a very short menu. If lunch had been the meal to which I invited the young couple the Hyde Park Hotel dining-room would have been a spot as inducive to day dreams as are the balconies at the Savoy and the Cecil, for the view the Hyde Park Hotel commands over the Park is one of the most beautiful and most varied in London. A strip of garden lies between the Hotel and the Ladies' Mile, and beyond that is the branch of Rotten Row that runs up past the Knightsbridge Barracks. Beyond that again are green lawns and clumps of rhododendrons and other flowering shrubs, and the grassy rise up to the banks of the Serpentine, the glitter of the water of which and the big trees about it closing in the landscape. The carriages go rumbling past; there are generally some riders in the Row and there is always movement on the footpath, and it seems to be one of the duties of the regiment of Household Cavalry at Knightsbridge to supply as a figure in the immediate foreground either a young orderly officer in his blue frock-coat setting out or returning from his rounds on a big black charger, or a rough-riding corporal in scarlet jacket teaching a young horse manners. The view up the river to Westminster may have a dreamy beauty on a sunshiny day, the vista of the long walk in the Green Park, down which the windows of the Ritz dining-room look, may have more sylvan beauty, but the outlook of the Hyde Park Hotel has more colour and more variety than those of the other big hotels I have mentioned. The Hyde Park Hotel was one of Jabez Balfour's speculations, and for a time it was a great pile of flats before it became technically an hotel. It had a fire, and I fancy that it was after the fire that M. Ritz was consulted as to its redecoration--for he had a great talent and indisputable taste in suggesting the ornamentation of large rooms--and that the Hyde Park Hotel became the exceedingly comfortable, quiet, luxurious house it is to-day.