Hyde Park does not really conform to our Continental notion of parks. It is a wide glade many miles long, where one occasionally comes across alleys of shady trees. There are hardly any flowers, and everywhere you look you see green, damp English grass. In winter, in the slack season of general unemployment, thousands of people gravitate there and lie – not getting up, not moving, almost without signs of life – for several days on this cold, wet grass. And each and every day the police gather up stiff corpses there – and the magistrates tabulate them under ‘accidental deaths’. But in summer, the grass is transformed. Loving couples make themselves comfortable on it, twenty-five per each square fathom, and kiss passionately, to the passers’-by great embarrassment. The embraces take place entirely in the open, for the Englishman has long been accustomed to consider Hyde Park his own property. He is master in his own country, and each of his acts takes place in full view of everyone.

Along one of the park's alleys, Rotten Row, carriages circulate ceaselessly. Here fashionable London shows off its outfits, its horses and its ale-flushed faces. It is not for nothing that one Thackeray character asks another: ‘Why did I not see you in Rotten Row last Sunday? Were you ill?’. Only an illness can prevent a high-born Londoner from engaging in this traditional pastime.

At the other end of the park, at the very entrance, something entirely different is taking place. On approaching, you see a well-dressed motley crowd, umbrellas, women with infants, pipes, policemen's blue helmets, top hats, and only when you find yourself inside the crowd do you notice how strictly it has differentiated itself into distinct groups.

Here, at the very edge, near the marble arch, is a dull huddle of people, entirely composed of spinsters of both sexes. Their clothes are every bit as worn as their faces; in vain do they seek to disguise the clothes’ venerable age by repeated applications of benzine. All are wearing gloves, even if the gloves are full of holes, and everyone exudes a strange smell of camphor.