Moll Davis by Bernard Capes — Read

Where the grounds of Buckingham Palace now extend, there stood in the seventeenth century the old flowery pleasaunce known as Mulberry Garden, a place long appropriated, like its Spring prototype at Whitehall, to _al fresco_ entertainment. Ex-mural and mural as things then went, there was to the ordinary cit a _soupcon_ of adventure suggested in a visit to this remoter fairyland; and, as a little enterprising beyond the confines of the orthodox adds a zest to the soberest merry-making, Mulberry Garden possessed an attraction for the town, which was certainly due as much to its comparative removedness as to any diversions it might offer in the way of dancing and junketing.

There was a mild thrill in achieving it, its wild and tangled acres, only gathered into cores of brilliancy at certain definite centres, where, after dark, the scattered threads of lamps, like gossamer hung with dew-drops, constellated thickly about groups of arbours, set in open spaces among the trees, where glittering forms circulated, and laughter rang, and cheese-cakes were eaten and lips kissed under fragrant ambushes of boughs woven into a thousand pretty devices of green garters and lovers' knots. There was here none of the structural artifices which later came to vulgarize, and, alas!