They played and laughed under the trees, they listened to Nettie’s amusing recitals of her adventurous life, which were varied—for she made her _début_ at Hackney’s Music Hall, and ended her career at the Alhambra! She greatly diverted her audience, for her ideas of the world at large were always flavoured with a grain of good-humoured satire and gentle humour. She was fresh and impulsive, human and perceptive, and possessed the invaluable gift of developing in the East-Ender girls the precious sense of humour and discrimination which lightens every burden, and seems to filter through opaque dulness like a ray of sunlight. How much more pleasant were those pastoral entertainments than the old-fashioned At Home, or even than the attractive garden parties! Tournaments were organised to promote the love of beauty, and to develop the imaginative power that lies more or less dormant in everyone, but more particularly so amongst the London poorer classes. The first one was a floral tournament. Every girl of the East-End and the West-End was to appear in the prettiest, and most original floral accoutrement; they were granted full permission to use their imagination to conceive wonderful designs and combination of colours; Gwen hoped in this way to instil in the Anglo-Saxon race an æsthetic knowledge of decoration which was sorely lacking. Another time she aimed at a more ambitious entertainment, and started a series of historical tournaments. A group of girls were selected amongst the West and East-End maidens, and to each of them an historical character was given to impersonate. Historians were invited to lecture on historical subjects so as to acquaint the girls with the character they wished to personify. This new mode of inoculating the taste for history was as instructive as it was dramatic; besides, it developed memory, for there was no doubt that the East-Ender’s ignorance, as related to past and present history, was not more appalling than that of the Mayfair belle. Nettie decided that the first three tournaments ought to be consecrated to personages of our own times, or at least the Victorian age; for uncultured minds could not be supposed to interest themselves in historical characters so far removed from the present period as Charles II., Henry VIII., or Alfred. It was gradually that the dramatic study of history was to take them backwards, instead of making them leap into a far-distant abyss, expecting the bewildered brain to grope its way back to our throbbing present.