The Merry Past 



a species of reward at which modesty would at other 

 seasons be shocked, but which, on this occasion, was 

 regarded merely as the effervescence of good humour. 

 While the lambs and lambkins were thus innocently 

 amusing themselves on the Hill, many groups were 

 seen in the lawn below, occupied in the various di- 

 versions of "Threading my Needle, Nan," " Hunt the 

 Slipper," " Kiss in the Ring," " Lug at the Crust," 

 and other old games, the frolic of which was con- 

 siderably heightened by falls and other humorous 

 accidents. 



At such times the gloom of the English character 

 was dissipated, and gaiety of the most free and un- 

 restrained kind was the order of the day. 



The tea-gardens in the neighbourhood of the 

 metropolis were crowded with visitors. Among those 

 most numerously attended were Bagnigge Wells, 

 White Conduit House, Canonbury House, Chalk 

 Farm, and Cumberland Gardens, in which the con- 

 sumption of those delicacies — tea and hot rolls, ale, 

 gin and ginger-bread, and other trifles, was truly 

 surprising. Indeed, so great was the call for grub, 

 as it was poetically termed at White Conduit House, 

 that it sometimes became necessary to send off a man 

 express to London to fetch a new cargo of second- 

 hand hot cross buns. 



In 1805 it was calculated that the number of 

 Londoners who spent their Sunday in the inns, tea- 

 houses, tea-gardens, and villages adjacent to town 

 was not less than two hundred thousand. 



These, it was said, each spent about half a crown, 



217 



