CHRIST WASHING ST. PETER'S FEET,

AFTER THE PICTURE BY FORD MADOX BROWN IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY

Regent's Park has the Botanical Gardens and the Zoological Gardens to add to its attractions. The Park itself is green and spacious, yet with too few trees to shade it, and too many wealthy private residents like unto moths fretting its garment. The stockbroker who stealthily encloses strips of a Surrey common must have learned his business in Regent's Park. But to any one who cares for horticulture or wild beasts this is the neighbourhood to live in in one of the cool white terraces on the park's edge, or thereabouts. When I first came to London I had rooms near by, and every Monday morning I visited the otter and the wombats and the wallabys Monday being a sixpenny day.

Since this book was written the Zoo has been enormously improved. New buildings have been erected; a new tunnel has been dug, a sudden cloud-burst one day having proved that the old one was a death-trap, for a number of children sheltering there were nearly drowned; and the Mappin Terraces have been set up, chiefly to the glory and honour of His Ursine Majesty.

Some day, I hope, the public generally will be allowed to visit the Zoo on Sundays.

The lions and the elephants will always be the most popular attraction, but I am still faithful to the sea lions and seals who, with the otters, least suggest that captivity is a martyrdom. They frolic while 'tis May, and May is continual with them. But I suppose the best time to see them is half-past three, when they are fed. In their fine home, which is a veritable mermaid's pool, with rocks and caverns and real depths of water, they have room for evolutions of delight : and as their keeper is a particularly sympathetic man with a fine dramatic sense, this makes feeding-time a very entertaining quarter of an hour. It is worth making a special effort to be there then, if only to see how one of these nimble creatures can hurl itself out of the water to a rock all in one movement. It is worth being there then to note the astounding and rapturous celerity with which the sea lions can move in the water beyond all trains and motor cars and the grace of them in their properer element.

Seals and sea lions, it is getting to be well known, are the real aristocrats of the brute creation. One had always heard this ; but it is only in recent years, since troupes of them have been seen on the variety stage, that one has realised it. When an ordinary wet seal from some chilly northern sea a thing that we kill to keep warm the shoulders of rich men's wives can balance a billiard cue on its nose with as much intelligence as the superb Cinquevalli, it is time to wonder if there is not some worthy mental destiny for it more useful in its way than any comforting property of its fur. That most animals can be taught routine, I know ; that they can be coached into mechanical feats is a commonplace : but to get one to understand the laws of gravity is a miracle. Not only in a stationary position can this amphibian balance the cue, but move flappingly along with its precarious burden and mount a pedestal. This is very wonderful. And at the Music Halls and Olympia, where these feats are displayed, other things happen too displays of humour, well-reasoned games of ball between two sea lions in their trainer's absence, and so forth which show that it is time for us to revise our notions of these gentle creatures. Here is a potential new force. It is undoubtedly time to clothe our wives in other material, and think of the seal less as a skin than a mind. We might try experiments. Suppose the Lord Chancellor really were a Great Seal.

Perhaps the seal is the superman of the future. In any case it should be the subject of a scientific memoir. When seals and sea lions come nearer our own vaunted abilities than any other member of the brute creation we are entitled to be told why. "Go to the ant" was never a piece of counsel that aroused me ; but "Go to the seal" has logic in it.

When the summer comes it is not, however, Hyde Park with its breadth of sky and its peacocks, not Kensington Gardens with its trees and the Round Pond's argosies, not Regent's Park even at sheep-shearing time, not St. James's Park with its water fowl ; it is none of these that call me. My open space then is Lord's cricket ground in St. John's Wood (where acacias and lilac flourish). For the Oval, the great south London ground, where Surrey used to beat all comers and may do so again, I have never much cared: it is not comfortable unless one is a member of the Club ; and I dislike gasometers. But Lord's I love, although I wish that one could see the game while strolling as once one could. It is now too much of a circus with raised seats. Still, sitting there at ease one may watch minutely the best cricket in the world. It was there that, scarlet with shame, I saw the Australian team of 1896 dismissed on a good wicket for 18, one after another falling to Pougher of Leicestershire, who had rarely terrified batsman before, and terrified none after; it was there that I saw Mr. Webbe bowled by Mordecai Sherwin, who took off the gloves for the purpose, leading to the batsman's famous mot that he "felt as if he had been run over by a donkey-cart"; it was there that I saw Mr. Stoddart drive a ball straight from the nursery end along the ground so hard that it rebounded forty measured yards from the Pavilion railings ; it was there that I saw three distinct hundreds scored in the University match of 1893 ; it was there that I saw Sir T. C. O'Brien and Mr. F. G. J. Ford heroically pull the Surrey and Middlesex match out of the fire in, I think, the same year. It was there in 1912 that I saw the great little McCartney miss his 100 by one run.

But when Albert Trott at last realised his ambition of hitting the ball clean over the Pavilion I was not there, Perhaps some one will do it again : cricket is full of thrills, and what man has done man can do.

Those are the moments that I recollected when this book was first written. Many have I experienced at Lord's since, and not least when its most popular latter day hero, Ernest, or "Patsy," Hendren, was batting, but they are too numerous to record. In 1921 new gates were erected in honour of the memory of W. G. Grace, Mr. Herbert Baker, the designer, calling in the aid of cricket symbolism very happily.

I like to approach Lord's through Dorset Square, which was the site of the original ground, because then I feel I may be passing over the exact spot where Alexander, Duke of Hamilton, was standing when he made his great drive a hit which sent the ball one hundred and thirty-two yards before it touched earth. A stone was erected to commemorate this feat. Where is it now?