I have little doubt our songsters excel in melody, while the European birds excel in profuseness and volubility.  I heard many bright, animated notes and many harsh ones, but few that were melodious.  This fact did not harmonize with the general drift of the rest of my observations, for one of the first things that strikes an American in Europe is the mellowness and rich tone of things.  The European is softer-voiced than the American and milder-mannered, but the bird voices seem an exception to this rule.

PARKS

While in London I had much pleasure in strolling through the great parks, Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, St. James Park, Victoria Park, and in making Sunday excursions to Richmond Park, Hampden Court Parks, and the great parks at Windsor Castle.  The magnitude of all these parks was something I was entirely unprepared for, and their freedom also; one could roam where he pleased.  Not once did I see a signboard, “Keep off the grass,” or go here or go there.  There was grass enough, and one could launch out in every direction without fear of trespassing on forbidden ground.  One gets used, at least I do, to such petty parks at home, and walks amid them so cautiously and circumspectly, every shrub and tree and grass plat saying “Hands off,” that it is a new sensation to enter a city pleasure ground like Hyde Park,—­a vast natural landscape, nearly two miles long and a mile wide, with broad, rolling plains, with herds of sheep grazing, and forests and lakes, and all as free as the air.  He have some quite sizable parks and reservations in Washington, and the citizen has the right of way over their tortuous gravel walks, but he puts his foot upon the grass at the risk of being insolently hailed by the local police.  I have even been called to order for reclining upon a seat under a tree in the Smithsonian grounds.  I must sit upright as in church.  But in Hyde Park or Regent’s Park I could not only walk upon the grass, but lie upon it, or roll upon it, or play “one catch all” with children, boys, dogs, or sheep upon it; and I took my revenge for once for being so long confined to gravel walks, and gave the grass an opportunity to grow under my foot whenever I entered one of these parks.

This free-and-easy rural character of the London parks is quite in keeping with the tone and atmosphere of the great metropolis itself, which in so many respects has a country homeliness and sincerity, and shows the essentially bucolic taste of the people; contrasting in this respect with the parks and gardens of Paris, which show as unmistakably the citizen and the taste for art and the beauty of design and ornamentation.  Hyde Park seems to me the perfection of a city pleasure ground of this kind, because it is so free and so thoroughly a piece of the country, and so exempt from any petty artistic displays.