The war and the mourning it entails appeared to have little effect on the celebrax tion of Whit Monday. It was a perfect day for a public holiday, brilliantly fine, set never oppressively hot, and all the open-air resorts were thronged. Tu spite of Fashoda and Willette's caricatures and the many other little causes of friction between France and England, enormous numbers went orer from here to Paris for a glimpse of the Exhibition. Indeed the returns of the Channel Steamboat Companies show that the much talked-off boycott of the Exhibition amounts to very little. The number of English visitors to the French capital far exceeds that during the last Paris Exhibition. The traffic returns of the railway companies show, too, that the number of people who spent their brief holiday at seaside and country resorts far exceeded that in any previous year. Even the poorer classes are evidently learning to enjoy their holidays sensibly I walked across Hampstead during the height of the Whit Monday carnival and was very much struck by the difference of its aspect as compared with that on a Bank Holiday a few years ago. Then, the whole mass of holiday makers crowded themselves on to the dusty paths along which were ranged the booths and cocoanut shies, and the pleasanter parts of the glorious heath were all but deserted. Now, the people seem to be learning to enjoy the beauties of nature, for they had spread themselves much ' more evenly over the whole expanse, to the attainment of " far more rational species of enjoyment.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.