Anonymous (The Southern Monthly Magazine)

Mrs. Simpkinson’s Party

in The Southern Monthly Magazine, September 1863. Reighton and Scales, Auckland, NZ.

The Regent’s Park...that grand resort of nursery-maids and Life Guardsmen from the Albany-street barracks, who seem, in conjunction with the wild beasts of the zoological, to have a monopoly of the park. On week-days it is deserted enough. A few perambulators are wheeled up under the shade, their contents being permitted to choke themselves quietly, whilst their attendant flirts with a red-jacketed giant; here and there may be seen some young ladies taking a morning’s constitutional, whilst if any of the male sex (Life-guards exempted) be seen about, they are either taking a short cut through the park, or have come there with a felonious design upon some of its frequenters.

In the Introduction to their new magazine the publishers 'especially welcomed contributions relating to this country,' but in the first issue many of them concerned the Old Country. Acknowledging the eminence of the English periodicals, they nevertheless trusted that 'the food for the imagination which our magazine will supply' would prove acceptable.

If you are fond of a walk, for the walk’s sake, no better place certainly can be found for it in town than the Regent’s Park; we may presume it was this reason which induced the two Misses Simpkinson, on the morning following ...to enter its gates and turn down one of its most unfrequented avenues. This time, however, it was not altogether deserted, for some way up, lying lazily along a bench and smoking a cigar, was a young man of some eight-and-twenty or thereabouts...Perhaps he had found the air of the Regent’s Park very reviving — perhaps it is no use conjecturing further, for as he sees the two young ladies approaching, he starts to his feet, runs forward to meet them.