It was high tide--spring tide, if you will--at half past-six o'clock on a warm June evening: not the commonplace ebb and flow of a vulgar river; but the mighty tide of fashion's wonderful sea, surging westward, under the dusty elms and lindens of the Lady's Mile. If you had driven round this very park between four and five on this very afternoon, you would have been gratified by the sight of some half-dozen nursemaids with their straggling charges, an occasional girl and perambulator, a picturesque life guardsman here and there, making a little spot of crimson amongst the wavering shadows of the trees, a few hulking idlers in corduroy and bluchers, and a tipsy female sleeping on the grass. Now the excited policemen have enough to do to keep the four ranks of carriages in line, and to rescue foot-passengers from the pawing hoofs of three-hundred-guinea steeds. The walk under the trees is as crowded as the enclosure at Ascot, and the iron chairs are as fully occupied as the seats in a fashionable chapel. The pouncing proprietor, with the leathern pouch at his side, has hard work to collect his rents, so rapidly do his customers come and go, and is distracted by vague fears of levanting tenants and bad debts. On all the length of the rails between Hyde-Park Corner and the Serpentine there is scarcely room for one lounger more, for the rule of fashion is so subtile a bondage, that it has compelled millions of people who never in all their lives have spoken to one another to wear the same order of garments, and talk the same slang, and ride in the same kind of carriages, and eat the same class of dinners, and congregate in the same places, at the same hour, year after year, and century after century, from the earliest dawn of civilisation until to-day.