To return to Mr Smith and St James's Park. After his Restoration, Charles the Second, who, as worthy Thomas Blount says in his Boscobel, had been hunted to and fro like a "partridge upon the mountains," became very _casanier_, decidedly stay-at-home, in his habits, and cared little to absent himself from London and its vicinity. He had had buffeting and wandering enough in his youth, and, on ascending the throne of his unfortunate father, he thought of little besides making himself comfortable in his capital, careless of expense, which, even in his greatest need, he seems never to have calculated. He planted the avenues of the park, made a canal and an aviary for rare birds, which gave the name to Bird-Cage Walk. Amongst other freaks, and to provide for a witty Frenchman who amused him, he erected Duck Island into a government. Charles de St Denis, seigneur of St Evremond, who had been banished from France for a satire on Cardinal Mazarine, was the first and, it is believed, the last governor. He drew the salary attached to the appointment, which was certainly a more lucrative than honourable one for a man of his talents and reputation. According to Evelyn, Charles stored the park with "numerous flocks of fowle. There were also deer of several countries--white, spotted like leopards; antelopes, as elk, red deer, roebucks, staggs, Guinea grates, Arabian sheep," &c. In the Mall, also made by him, Charles played at ball and took his daily walk. "Here," says Colley Cibber, "Charles was often seen amid crowds of spectators, feeding his ducks and playing with his dogs, affable even with the meanest of his subjects." Mr Smith regrets the diminished affability and less accessible mood of sovereigns of the nineteenth century, although he admits that the populace of France and England are at the present day too rude for it to be advisable that kings and queens should walk amongst them with the easy familiarity of the second Charles. Of that there can be very little doubt. Even Charles, whose dislike of ceremony and restraint, and love of gossip and new faces, were cause, at least as much as any desire for popularity, that he thus mingled with the mob, occasionally experienced the disagreeables of his undignified manner of life. Aubrey the credulous, Mr Smith tells us, relates in his Miscellanies the following anecdote of an incident that occurred in the Park. "Avise Evans had a fungous nose, and said that it was revealed to him that the king's hand would cure him: and at the first coming of King Charles II. into St James's Park, he kissed the king's hand, and rubbed his nose with it, which disturbed the king, but cured him." It was whilst walking on the Mall that the pretended Popish plot of Oates and Bedloe was announced to Charles. "On the 12th of August 1678," says Hume, "one Kirby, a chemist, accosted the king as he was walking in the Park. 'Sir,' said he, 'keep within the company; your enemies have a design upon your life, and you may be shot in this very walk.' Being asked the reason of these strange speeches, he said that two men, called Grove and Pickering, had engaged to shoot the king, and Sir George Wakeman, the queen's physician, to poison him." Charles, unlike his grandfather, the timid James, was little apprehensive of assassination, and, when sauntering in the Park, preferred the society of two or three intimates to the attendance of a retinue. On one occasion, however, as a biographer has recorded, an impudent barber startled him from his usual happy _insouciance_. Accustomed to chat familiarly with his good-humoured master, the chin-scraper ventured to observe, whilst operating upon that of the king, that he considered no officer of the court had a more important trust than himself. "Why so, friend?" inquired the king. "Why," replied the barber, "I could cut your majesty's throat whenever I chose." Charles started up in consternation, swore that the very thought was treason, and the indiscreet man of razors was deprived of his delicate charge.