trip is not so cheap. The members club their
funds, the men paying 1s. each, the wives, 6d., the children, 3d. or
4d.; and any poor little ragged orphan urchin, who may be hanging
about the workshop, gets accommodated with a borrowed jacket and
trousers, and a gratuitous face-washing from Mrs Grundy, and is taken
for nothing, and well fed into the bargain. The cost, something over a
guinea, is easily made up, and if any surplus remains, why, then, they
hire a fiddler to go along with them. On the appointed morning, at an
early hour, rain or shine, they flock to the rendezvous to the number
of forty or fifty--ten or a dozen more or less is a trifle not worth
mentioning. Each one carries his own provisions, and loaded with
baskets, cans, bottles, and earthen-jars, mugs and tea-kettles, in
they bundle, and off they jog--pans rattling, women chattering,
kettles clinking, children crowing, fiddle scraping, and men
smoking--at the rate of six or seven miles an hour, to Hampton Court
or Epping Forest. It is impossible for a person who has never
witnessed these excursions in the height of summer, to form an
adequate notion of the merry and exciting nature of the relaxation
they afford to a truly prodigious number of the hardworking classes.
Returning from Kingston to London one fine Monday morning in June
last, we met a train of these laughter-loaded vans, measuring a full
mile in length, and which must have consisted of threescore or more
vehicles, most of them provided with music of some sort, and adorned
with flowers and green boughs. As they shot one at a time past the
omnibus on which we sat, we were saluted by successive volleys of
mingled mirth and music, and by such constellations of merry-faced
mortals in St Monday garb, as would have made a sunshine under the
blackest sky that ever gloomed. Arrived at Hampton Court, the separate
parties encamp under the trees in Bushy Park, where they amuse
themselves the livelong day in innocent sports, for which your
Londoner has at bottom a most unequivocal and hearty relish. They
will most likely spend a few hours in wandering through the
picture-galleries in the palace, then take a stroll in the exquisite
gardens, where the young fellow who is thoughtless enough to pluck a
flower for his sweetheart, is instantly and infallibly condemned to
drag a heavy iron roller up and down the gravel-walk, to the amusement
of a thousand or two of grinning spectators. Having seen the palace
and