THE ASTROVEGETARIAN HALL in Villiers Street, Strand, is one of several such edifices erected in London to house the opinions of the sect or philosophical society or collection of cranks which has subscribed to build a temple of its own. They usually consist of a fairly large central hall with a number of smaller lecture-rooms attached, and the sect or society by letting out these rooms and the main hall itself often derives a handsome return on the investment in the shape of rent.

The Astrovegetarian Society itself used its hall only on certain dates like the Summer and Winter Solstice connected immemorially with the influence of the heavenly bodies upon the fertility of the earth, and such was its broadmindedness that if a Butchers’ Friendly Society had desired to use the hall for some celebration it would have been let to them for the fixed fee.

On this Friday evening in August the lecture-rooms were experiencing the effect of the holiday season, but even so, besides the booking of the main hall for the National Union of Hikers, rooms had been booked for the Society for the Promotion of Non-metallic Gramophone Needles, the Birth Control Crusade (Shock Troops Debating Society), the Root and Branch League, the Friends of Wo Ho Wo, the Edible Fungus Club and the London Animist Association. It was remarkable with what accuracy the janitor directed the members of these various gatherings to the right room almost before they had time to name their particular objective, for outwardly they all looked much the same mixture of dowdiness and defiance.

Naturally the great majority of those turning into the Astrovegetarian Hall that evening were members of the National Union of Hikers, and by ten minutes to eight the central hall was already full of healthy happy sunburnt young people, with a sprinkling of equally healthy happy sunburnt slightly older people, all singing the Hikers’ Song interspersed with some of the favourite songs of the First Great War. It might be said that they made the welkin ring, for the dome of the Astrovegetarian Hall was gilded with planets and stars on a cerulean ground. It was divided into the twelve signs of the zodiac, beneath each one of which was a plaster representation of some prominent vegetable associated with its influence. Nor were the vegetables ruled by the planets uncelebrated. Thus one might behold in coloured plaster the spinach of Saturn, Jupiter’s asparagus, the mustard and rhubarb of Mars, the Moon’s cabbages, the beans and parsnips of Venus, Mercury’s carrots and the ginger of the Sun. At the back of the platform was a sort of carved reredos on which symbolical figures in flowing draperies stood about in æsthetic attitudes with sheaves and cornucopias.