Places of refreshment might so easily add enormously to the amenities of the London parks and gardens if good food, attractively and quickly provided, could be obtained. Nature has furnished an exquisite background for a sylvan meal, but anyone who has ordered tea at one of these places carries away a regret for what might have been. Perhaps that is why it has never been fashionable to take tea in the park since the Georgian days when people stood on chairs to see the beautiful Miss Gunnings pass by. The latest fashions were always worn first in Hyde Park. The daring of any Paris _mannequin_ at the Grand Prix pales before the effect made by the Lady Caroline Campbell of George III.’s reign, who “displayed in Hyde Park the other day a feather four feet higher than her bonnet.” In Victorian days the smart world strolled on the south walk between Hyde Park Corner and Alexandra Gate, but to-day that is given over to the curious strata of society, vomited up from a volcanic war, that now fill the stalls in the theatres and the restaurants that used to call themselves exclusive. Fashion is slowly retiring--first to the part of the park opposite Park Lane and then to the northern side opposite Lancaster Gate. Perhaps it is making the tour, and when the profiteer and his family have discovered that they are in sole possession of this south-east part of the park, they will move off and the wheel will turn once more. Why the big statue close to Hyde Park Corner is called the Achilles Statue is one of London’s mysteries for which there is no more reason than the nursemaid had when she familiarly designated Watts’ “Physical Energy” in Kensington Gardens as “The Galloping Major.” “Achilles” is a copy of one of the horse trainers of the Monte Cavallo in Rome. The Pope gave the cast, the Ordnance Department gave the metal of the cannon taken in the battles of Salamanca, Vittoria, Toulouse and Waterloo, and the women of England subscribed £10,000 to this memorial of the Iron Duke and his comrades-in-arms. Where Achilles comes in, I do not know. Each of the great London parks is associated with some special English sovereign. Charles II. is the godfather of St. James’s Park; Regent’s Park, like Regent Street, was planned for the glorification of the man who was afterwards George IV.; Battersea is associated with Prince Albert the Good, and we owe Kew to the Princess Augusta, mother of George III. Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens owe their allegiance to Queen Caroline, George II.’s queen. It was she who converted the ponds and the Westbourne stream into the fifty acres of water of the Serpentine which, now derived from the Thames, feeds the ornamental water in Buckingham Palace Gardens and St. James’s Park. The king thought she was doing it all out of her own purse and smiled at all her schemes, little dreaming that with Walpole’s aid she was letting him in for some £20,000--a fact he only discovered after her death.