k swam
placidly close to her brood and clucked in a low voice all kinds of
warnings and advice and reproof to the little ones. Mary Makebelieve
thought it was very clever of the little ducklings to be able to swim
so well. She loved them, and when nobody was looking she used to cluck
at them like their mother, but she did not often do this because she
did not know duck language really well, and feared that her cluck
might mean the wrong things, and that she might be giving these
innocents bad advice, and telling them to do something contrary to
what their mother had just directed.

The bridge across the big lake was a fascinating place. On the sunny
side lots of ducks were always standing on their heads searching for
something in the water, so that they looked like only half ducks. On
the shady side hundreds of eels were swimming about--they were most
wonderful things; some of them were thin like ribbons, and others were
round and plump like thick ropes. They never seemed to fight at all,
and although the ducklings were so tiny the big eels never touched any
of them, even when they dived right down amongst them. Some of the
eels swam along very slowly, looking on this side and on that as if
they were out of work or up from the country, and others whizzed by
with incredible swiftness. Mary Makebelieve thought that the latter
kind had just heard their babies crying; she wondered, when a little
fish cried, could its mother see the tears where there was already so
much water about, and then she thought that maybe they cried hard
lumps of something that was easily visible.

After this she would go around the flower-beds and look at each; some
of them were shaped like stars, and some were quite round, and others
again were square. She liked the star-shaped flower-beds best, and
next she liked the round ones, and last of all the square. But she
loved all the flowers, and used to make up stories about them.

After that, growing hungry, she would go home for her lunch. She went
home down Grafton Street and O'Connell Street. She always went along
the right-hand side of the street going home, and looked in every shop
window that she passed, and then, when she had eaten her lunch, she
came out again and walked along the left-hand side of the road,
looking at the shops on that side, and so she knew daily everything
that was new in the city, and was able to tell her mother at nighttime
that the black dress with Spanish lace was ta