122 KEW GARDENS 



speaking to their friends, and the royal children 

 amusing themselves in their own gardens. 

 Parties came up by water, too, with bands of 

 music, to sit opposite the Prince of Wales's 

 house. The whole was a scene of enchantment 

 and delight ; Royalty living among their subjects 

 to give pleasure and to do good." The brothers 

 of Granville Sharpe, the philanthropist, kept 

 moored at Fulham a notable fleet of pleasure- 

 boats, one of them a barge or "yacht," serving 

 as house-boat in summer, on which the owners 

 took trips up the Thames, sometimes stopping 

 to serenade the royal family or to have the 

 honour of receiving on board the King and 

 Queen, or the young princes under care of their 

 tutors. This stretch of the Thames is said to 

 have been the nursery of pleasure-boating ; but 

 though a canoe and a shallop are enumerated 

 among the Sharpes' craft, we do not yet hear of 

 fine gentlemen, still less ladies, undertaking to 

 row themselves. 



The village began to grow apace, old houses 

 being pulled down or enlarged, and new ones 

 built towards Richmond along what is now the 

 thoroughfare of a big London suburb. The 

 population was swollen by all sorts of new- 



