ights, I would creep softly out of the
room, ashamed and shaken, and would wait in the hall outside till the
happy ending was in plain view. So my mother had gradually toned down
all the fights and the killings, the witches and the monsters, and much
to my disappointment had wholly shut out the gory pirates who were for
me the most frightfully fascinating of all. Sometimes I felt vaguely
that for this she had her own reason, too--that my mother hated
everything that had to do with the ocean, especially my father's dock
that made him so gloomy and silent. But of this I could never be quite
sure. I would often watch her intently, with a sudden sharp anxiety,
for I loved my mother with all my soul and I could not bear to see her
unhappy.

"Never on any account," I heard her say to Belle, "are the children to
go down the street toward the docks."

"Yes, ma'am," said Belle. "I'll see to it."

At once I wanted to go there. The street in front of our house sloped
abruptly down at the next corner two blocks through poorer and smaller
houses to a cobblestone space below, over which trucks clattered,
plainly on their way to the docks. So I could go down and around by that
way. How tempting it all looked down there. Above the roofs of the
houses, the elevated railroad made a sharp bend on its way to the
Bridge, trains roared by, high over all the Great Bridge swept across
the sky. And below all this and more thrilling than all, I caught
glimpses of strange, ragged boys. "Micks," Belle sometimes called them,
and sometimes, "Finian Mickies." Up here I had no playmates.

From now on, our garden lost its charms. Up the narrow courtway which
ran along the side of the house I would slip stealthily to the front
gate and often get a good look down the street before Belle sharply
called me back. The longest looks, I found, were always on Sunday
afternoons, when Belle would sit back there in the garden, close to the
bed of red tulips which encircled a small fountain made of two white
angels. Belle, who was bony, tall and grim, would sit by the little
angels reading her shabby Bible. Her face was wrinkled and almost brown,
her eyes now kind, now gloomy. She had a song she would sing now and
then. "For beneath the Union Jack we will drive the Finians back"--is
all I can remember. She told me of witches in the Scotch hills. At her
touch horrible monsters rose in the most surprising places. In the
bathtub, for example, when I stayed in the