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Show IMPRESSIONS OLD AND NEW London's Parks. Their Characteristics. Theatres and Music Halls. Dan Leno. The Hippodrome. The Wonderful Crystal Crys-tal Palace. Earl's Court and Its Exhibition. Exhi-bition. (Written for Intermountain Ca'holie.) London, as almost every other city in England, has a number of fine parks and they are of immense im-mense advantage to every class of the community, especially the working class. Each of London's parks has its own distinctive character. You want to see the elite of London well, take the buss on a summer's morning and visit Hyde Park. You will behold enough of fashion and the fashionable there to do you for a lifetime. Kensington Gardens is frequented by flocks of children with their nurses and toys. You are a botanizer or have a hankering to behold the wild denizens of the forest; take a. trip to Regent's Park. You would like to enjoy repose in the heart of the trob and din of London, visit Green Park and you will obtain it there. You are an athlete and hanker after games, Battersea Park is the place for you. If you want to write a bock on the habits of water fowl, St. James' Park supplies a good field for your pen. All these park are beautifully kept and are well studded with tree and flower beds of every hue and shape, and in the evenings bands discourse sweet music in them. Hyde Park is remarkable for other things too, besides be-sides fashion, horsemanship, carriages and motors. On a Sunday evening it, is the battle ground of creeds, and near the Marble Arch you can hear on that evening self commissioned preachers tell the listless idlers round about the way to heaven and the other place. The religious din is sometimes intolerable in-tolerable and why the authorities allow these ranter, rant-er, of-. ,,u , i t n ouuivio om.li nu ia mui c mail j. tnu leu. xiii v - way, they are a nuisance. Here, too, labor parties meet and discuss their grievances, and Socialists build earthly paradises for their hearers, while the capitalist is bound hand and foot and cast into interior in-terior darkness. A very beautiful nlace to visit also is the Lord's Cricket Ground in St. John's Wood. 'You can sit at ease there and enjoy to the full the- best cricket in the world. I know of no city anywhere any-where else in which there are so many theatres and music halls, and all of them have a good audience while the season lasts. Some of London's theatre have a world-wide reputation on account of the famous fa-mous actors connected at one time or other with them. Haymarket, Drury Lane, The Lyceum and The Garrick for instance. The English are a theatre-going people and even two hours before the various theatres open you see long rows of men and women wait patiently outside the theatre doors for admission. A policeman is there to keep order, but he seldom or ever has to exercise his authority. London's special form of entertainment is. however, not the theatre, but the music halls, and these stud all parts of the city, especially Leicester Square. Of late years this class of entertainment has grown, rapidly in London, and in the most of the halls you have two performances each night. The halls as a general rule do not reach a high mark of excellence and no effort is made to depart from the oldv beaten track of vulgarity and very commonplace jokes, and the only humor is that of the street and the tap room. However, London has and had artists who produced humor with a genius, a gentleness, a cyn-icalness cyn-icalness never surpassed, instance such names as George Roby, Little TichT Marie Lloyd and poor Dan Leno. It is said of the latter that no one ever on the stage produced more laughter and cleaner laughter. . Though his subjects often treated of the seamy side of life still Dan with his eager, sympathetic sympa-thetic little figure and childish voice transmuted the mud into gold. Xot very long ago I had the pleasure of talking to a well known American actor and the subject of our conversation was the stage. Speaking about artists I happened to ask him did he ever hear Dan Leno. Before answering me he looked out fhe window as if conjuring up a portrait of that wistful little figure and then the words came : "Poor Dan. Yes, I have seen him in Xew York and the American people did not take to him. I shall never forget the first night of his appearance there. Great things were expected of him, but the first two items on his program were received in stony silence, and when he appeared the third time I never pitied a man so much but a well known actress act-ress saved the situation. Leaning out over her box she excitedly whispered, "Dan, do tl)3 shop-walker.' Dan took her hint and brought down the house. Yes, he resumed, Dan was a failure here and all because I think the Americans looked for cynicism, and he gave them humor, the humor which brought the tears, and they had no use for it." Poor Dan, whose real name was the Irish one of George Galvin, was London's music hall pet and it will never have his equal. Xearly every visitor to London goes to see the hippodrome, one side of Leicester Square, and above the Alhambra. It is a spacious building capable of holding over 3,000 people. You have, I believe, three performance? there daily, and the tastes of everyone h catered to as the itemsare of a varied character. I enjoyed my visit to it very much, in fact I went twice and all because I saw there a very realistic fox hunt, and an Indian attack upon a mining camp. Everything Every-thing was so real about both these items. You had the huntsmen in scarlet coats, the hounds, a cunning cun-ning live fox. th various obstacles, stone walls, rivers, dykes and such like, while uprm your ears broke the tally-ho of the huntsman ard the deep bay of the hounds in full cry. The Indians attack was so real. too. in fact so real that one grew"a little uppiv in his seat lest one of these painted braves would go seeking for scalps among the audience. (Continued on Page 5.) j ,,' I- IMPRESSIONS OLD AND NEW (Continued from page 1.) Another place the visitor will find a wealth of enjoyment en-joyment is Earl's Court. You can take the buss at Trafalgar Square and after a ride of about an hour you reach it. I think I may safely say that for varied va-ried entertainment there is no place like Earl's Court in the world. You have music, and the English Eng-lish military bands cannot be surpassed, fine paintings, paint-ings, statuary, many samples of foreign villages, variety shows, aerial machines, boating and a hundred hun-dred other forms of amusement and to crown all you can obtain as good and as cheap a meal there as in the heart of the city. To see the Crystal Palace, the wonderful palace of glass, the visitor must take the train. A good station and a convenient one, is Victoria. For n day's outing I know of no place to equal the Crystal Palace. Its park is the. finest in England and as you gaze from the terrace out on the many and variegated flower beds with the wealth of statuary beside and around them, the 9ight is magnificent. You can see a model of the Avorld's great statues in Crystal Palace, with many interesting relics of famous fa-mous battles and ancient cities. The amusement park of Crystal Palace is the same almost as that of Earl's Court. Polo matches, cricket and football , matches are played there, too, during the season, and the crowd oh certain occasions reaches the enormous figure of eighty thousand. Xext week I will ask my reader to accompany be to the Tower of London and Kensington Palace and then we will bid good-bye to England and go to the most populous popu-lous and industrious nation in Europe Belerium. ' XAITER TANDY, London, June 10, 1909. |