The British Empire Exhibition By Crermia Maoumne, It is many years since I spent Easter in London, it is one's general inclination to got into green fields and leafy pleasaunces at this most wonderful of the year's rivals, but I covid not have imagined there would be so much charm in London itself.
For one thing spring came in over the four Easter days; the calendar announced it four weeks earlier but there was scarcely a tree budding on Good-Friday ove, just a chestnut or two getting bulgy and lilac in faint leaf. By Sunday they were ablaze, elms and poplars and oaks and larches,—oven the faithful London plane-tree, which sends its roots deep and is therefore the latest to feel the warm earth, was Knobby at at twig-tip.
From my window overlooking Thames I could almost see the change take piaes, first a hawthorn would be green, then an almond would have burst into flower, and by the time I looked again an ash would have shaken its purplish buds into fluffy greenery. Fruit trees were all snowy before the holiday was over.
London at Easter-time was transformed. On Good Friday it might have been a Foreign City. In Fleet Street, Trafalgar Square and ite hall I heard more Frene! spoken than English. Bands visitors, guide-book in hand, loitered in the Abbey Cloisters' or fed pigeons at St. Paul's, packed char-A-banes dashed dangerously through
guides, aut!
er wise deserted streets, whiler brought so many visitors to London. The buildings are magnificent and the whole things has been designed on a scale which is large and generous. The Hongkong section in particular appealed to me, with its green upturned roofs reminiscent of Peking. From the tea-house, where Chinese meals can be partaken of, Jcame strains of music as I approached, real Chinese music such as I had not heard since I left the East.
T have often wondered why London's Chinese Restaurants do not cut the jazz.
In Wembley's Hongkong are shops run by firms well-known to Shanghai-dwellers, _"Wing-On," "Sincere" and others.. You can get food-stuffs or furniture, umbrellas not so much above those I paid in Shanghai itself. I did not see any of those wooden figures which are so familiar in Hongkew (and which by-the-way are much prized by folk at home) but I did see a man fashioning little figures in wax such as they make in the Chinese City. I think I shall always take myself first to that corner of the grounds.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.