little place to come home to at night. "I guess he has
never seen it much," I snorted.

For I had. From our narrow brownstone house on the Heights, ever since I
could remember (and let me tell you that seems a long time when you are
seven years old), I had looked down from our back windows upon a harbor
that to me was strange and terrible.

I was glad that our house was up so high. Its front was on a sedate old
street, and within it everything felt safe. My mother was here, and Sue,
my little sister, and old Belle, our nurse, our nursery, my games, my
animals, my fairy books, the small red table where I ate my supper, and
the warm fur rug by my bed, where I knelt for "Now I lay me."

But from the porch at the back of our house you went three steps down to
a long narrow garden--at least the garden seemed long to me--and if you
walked to the end of the garden and peered through the ivy-covered bars
of the fence, as I had done when I was so little that I could barely
walk alone, you had the first mighty thrill of your life. For you found
that through a hole in the ivy you could see a shivery distance straight
down through the air to a street below. You found that the two iron
posts, one at either end of the fence, were warm when you touched them,
had holes in the top, had smoke coming out--were chimneys! And slowly it
dawned upon your mind that this garden of yours was nothing at all but
the roof of a gray old building--which your nurse told you vaguely had
been a "warehouse" long ago when the waters of the harbor had come 'way
in to the street below. The old "wharves" had been down there, she said.
What was a "wharf?" It was a "dock," she told me. And she said that a
family of "dockers" lived in the building under our garden. They were
all that was left in it now but "old junk." Who was Old Junk, a man or a
woman? And what in the world were Dockers?

Pursuing my adventurous ways, I found at one place in the garden, hidden
by flowers near a side wall, a large heavy lid which was painted brown
and felt like tin. But how much heavier than tin. Tug as I might, I
could not budge it. Then I found it had an iron hook and was hooked down
tight to the garden. Yes, it was true, our whole garden was a roof! I
put my ear down to the lid and listened scowling, both eyes shut. I
heard nothing then, but I came back and tried it many times, until once
I jumped up and ran like mad. For faintly from somewhere deep down under
the flower