Unfortunate Parisians, who are obliged to skirt the Tuileries gardens, closed inexorably at seven o’clock on a summer evening, envy the Londoner who may enjoy the leafy cool of his parks till long after dark, the carriage entrances not being closed till midnight. You may see an extraordinary number of quite different phases of English life in Hyde Park. There are the loafers, including the errand boys and that mysterious class of people who seem to have nothing to do in life but “invite their soul” at eleven o’clock of a fine morning. Unless they are content with a bench, the peace has made this feat more expensive than it used to be, for when the price of everything else was happily falling, the rusty individual who was wont to interrupt true lovers’ conversations by heartlessly demanding a penny, was suddenly inspired to double the price of the chairs that have been hired in the park for the last hundred years. Then there is the gallant sight of Rotten Row, named from the Route du Roi that William III. used when he rode from Whitehall to Kensington. The present Rotten Row was made by George I. when he wanted a shorter cut through the park. The best time to see the riders is the early morning, and the bathers have to get up still earlier if they want to plunge into the Serpentine, for the bathing is over at 8.30 a.m. In the afternoon the Hyde Park orator comes into his own and the whole of the Marble Arch corner turns into a factory for letting off steam. It is let off by the partisans of different religions who vociferate side by side, each demonstrating that his particular set of tenets is the only means to salvation. It is let off by socialists and communists and bolsheviks, and everyone who fancies he can alter the existing conditions to his own advantage,--and behind all these fiery-tongued speechmakers stand the placid good-natured policemen who look on with all the indulgence of a kindly nurse towards a fractious child, answering an amused inquiry with a paternal: “It don’t ’urt anyone and it does them a power of good to get it off their chests!” Among the phases to be noticed are the picnic parties who come to the park prepared to make a day of it, and the children of every class of society, and the nursemaids whose very name reminds one of his Majesty’s forces both military and naval, who are also ardent patrons of the park.