e who is living now can remember,
there was a garden in the corner of St. James's Park called Spring
Gardens, and people used to go there to dance and enjoy themselves; here
there were cows, and fashionable ladies used to get up early in the
morning and go to drink the milk which had just been taken from the
cows. At this place there was a spring of water, which used to start up
from the ground if anyone walked over a particular piece of ground, and
so pressed the grass with his foot. Sometimes a person did not know
this, and would come walking quite gravely along and tread on that
place, and a great stream of water would jump out of the ground all over
him, and the other people would shout and laugh with amusement to see
him so unexpectedly drenched. We would not like that much now--we should
think it rather rude and unkind to laugh at such a thing; but people had
rougher manners then. Now there are houses built nearly all over Spring
Gardens. King Charles I., who had spent the night before he was murdered
at St. James's Palace, walked this way when he went to be beheaded.

There is a walk in St. James's Park called the Mall, and this name comes
from Pall Mall, which was the name of an old game Charles II. used to
play here. It must have been rather a funny game, and no one plays it
now. The players had long mallets, which were not quite like croquet
mallets, but more like golf clubs, and they had a wooden ball about the
size of a croquet ball, and they tried to hit the ball through a hoop
high up in the air hanging from a pole. It must have been difficult and
rather dangerous to have a ball as big as a croquet ball hopping about
and jumping up in the air, but we do not read of any accidents
happening.

Another palace in London, which is some way from the others and in
another park, is Kensington Palace, and this is not now used by the King
at all, but he allows some ladies and gentlemen to live there. This
palace will always be of very great interest to all of us, because it
was here that good Queen Victoria was born, and here she lived when she
was a little girl. Do you remember my telling you about Kensington
Gardens and the Round Pond, where Ethel and Jack went for their walk?
Well, the palace is there, and I wonder how many children who run and
play in the gardens every day ever think of the childhood of little
Princess Victoria. You know, when she was quite a little girl, it was
not known that she would be Queen