Green Park has another gate, part of which I am sure is unnoticed, for how many people know that in the Wellington Arch at the top of Constitution Hill, at the upper end of the Green Park, sixteen policemen and an inspector have their happy home. Their special task is to direct the traffic at Hyde Park Corner, no easy matter in the season or when the king and queen and other notabilities come driving out to take the air. From their bedroom in the Arch they can climb on to the wide flat top, and under the shadow of the splendid group of Peace in her flying chariot, look over a wonderful vista of park and palace and highway. ST. JAMES’S PARK “La beauté de Londres n’est pas dans ses monuments mais dans son immensité.”--ZOLA. What would old Lenôtre, Louis XIV.’s court gardener, who laid out St. James’s Park, think if he could see his handiwork to-day? He would make a witty jest of it, perhaps, for he was a charming old man of a guileless simplicity that made him beloved of everyone, even in the most artificial court in Europe. Charles II. invited the famous French landscape gardener, who had created Versailles out of a sandhill, to come and transform the swampy meadow that adjoined the palace Henry VIII. had fashioned out of the twelfth-century Lepers Hospital, dedicated to St. James the Less, which has given its name to the palace and park. St. James’s has always been a very royal park since the days when the young Princess Elizabeth rode through it from her father’s new palace to the court at Whitehall, attended “with a very honourable confluence of noble and worshipful persons of both sexes.” Charles I. took his last walk through it on his way to the scaffold in Whitehall. Charles II. spent much of his time playing with his dogs and feeding his ducks there, and he planted some of the oaks from the acorns of the royal oak at Boscobel. His aviary on the south side is still remembered in the name of Birdcage Walk, and the tradition is carried on by the aquatic birds that again haunt the ornamental water as before the war. Walpole in his reminiscences quotes George I. as saying: This is a strange country. The first morning after my arrival at St. James’s, I looked out of the window, and saw a park with walls, canal, etc., which they told me were mine. The next day, Lord Chetwynd the Ranger of _my_ Park, sent me a fine brace of carp out of _my_ canal; and I was told I must give five guineas to Lord Chetwynd’s servant for bringing me _my own_ carp out of _my own_ canal _in my own garden_. I always loved, too, the reply of Walpole’s father to Queen Caroline when she asked how much it would cost to close St. James’s Park for the royal use and he answered, “only three crowns, Madam.” REGENT’S PARK “London is before all things an incomparable background.”--F. M. HUEFFER.