lish king and
nobles.

As time went on London began to grow in a way which seemed alarming to
the people of the seventeenth century, though even then it was but a
tiny town in comparison with the London of to-day. The fashionable
people and courtiers began to build houses in the western "suburbs,"
as they were then called, though now they are looked upon as very
central districts. It was chiefly in the seventeenth century that what
we now know as the _West End_ became a residential quarter. Some parts
of the West End are, of course, still the most fashionable parts of
London; but some, like Covent Garden and Lincoln's Inn Fields, have
been given over to business.

Most of the best-known names in the West End date from the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. The most fashionable street of all,
_Piccadilly_, probably got its name from the very fashionable collar
called a _pickadil_ (from the Spanish word _picca_, "a spear") which
the fine gentlemen wore as they swaggered through the West End in the
early seventeenth century. _Pall Mall_ and the _Mall_ in St. James's
Park took their names from a game which was very fashionable after the
Restoration, but which was already known in the time of Charles I. The
game was called _pall-mall_, from the French _paille-maille_. After
the Restoration Charles II. allowed the people to use St. James's
Park, which was a royal park, and Londoners used to watch respectfully
and admiringly as Charles and his brother James played this game.

_Spring Gardens_, also in St. James's Park, reminds us of the lively
spirits of Restoration times. It was so called because of a fountain
which stood there, and which was so arranged that when a passer-by
trod by accident on a certain valve the waters spurted forth and
drenched him. We should not think this so funny now as people did
then.

At the same time that the West End was growing, poorer districts were
spreading to the north and east of the City. _Moorfields_ (which tells
us by its name what it was like in the early London days) was built
over. _Spitalfields_ (which took its name from one of the many
hospitals which religious people built in and near mediaeval London)
and _Whitechapel_ also filled up, and became centres of trade and
manufacture. The games and sports which amused the people in these
poorer quarters were not so refined as the ball-throwing of the
princes and courtiers. In the name _Balls Pond Road_, Islington, we
are reminde