certain barracks where there was always a chance of military, and were
hard by Buckingham Palace with its chances of royalty. But the resort of
the poorer sort of pleasure-seekers is eminently Battersea Park, to
which we drove one hot, hot Sunday afternoon in late July,
conscience-stricken that we had left it so long out of our desultory
doing and seeing. It was full of the sort of people we had expected to
find in it, but these people though poor were not tattered. The
Londoner, of whatever class is apt to be better dressed than the
New-Yorker of the same class, and the women especially make a bolder
attempt than ours, if not so well advised, at gayety. They had put on
the best and finest they had, in Battersea Park, and if it was not the
most fitting still they wore it. The afternoon was sultry to
breathlessness; yet a young mother with a heavy baby in her arms
sweltered along in the splendor of a purple sack of thick plush; she was
hot, yes; but she had it on. The young girls emulated as well as they
could the airy muslins and silks in which the great world was flitting
and flirting at the same hour in the closes of Hyde Park, and if the
young fellows with these poor girls had not the distinction of the
swells in the prouder parade they at least equalled them in their
aberrations from formality.

There was not much shade in Battersea Park for the people to sit under,
but there was almost a superabundance of flowers in glaring beds, and
there were pieces of water, where the amateur boatman could have the
admiration of watchers, two or three deep, completely encircling the
ponds. To watch them and to walk up and down the shadeless aisles of
shrubbery, to sit on the too sunny benches, and to resort in extreme
cases to the tea-house which offered them ices as well as tea, seemed to
be the most that the frequenters of Battersea Park could do. We
ourselves ordered tea, knowing the quality and quantity of the public