ands and mysteries of the deep; sometimes some curly-headed cabin-boy
would give her a shell or a plume of seaweed, and try and make her
understand what the wonderful wild water was like, which was not quiet
and sluggish and dusky as this canal was, but was forever changing and
moving, and curling and leaping, and making itself now blue as her eyes,
now black as that thunder-cloud, now white as the snow that the winter
wind tossed, now pearl hued and opaline as the convolvulus that blew in
her own garden.

And Bebee would listen, with the shell in her lap, and try to
understand, and gaze at the ships and then at the sky beyond them, and
try to figure to herself those strange countries to which these ships
were always going, and saw in fancy all the blossoming orchard province
of green France, and all the fir-clothed hills and rushing rivers of the
snow-locked Swedish shore, and saw too, doubtless, many lands that had no
place at all except in dreamland, and were more beautiful even than the
beauty of the earth, as poets' countries are, to their own sorrow,
oftentimes.

But this dull day Bebee did not go down upon the wharf; she did not want
the sailors' tales; she saw the masts and the bits of bunting that
streamed from them, and they made her restless, which they had never done
before.

Instead she went in at a dark old door and climbed up a steep staircase
that went up and up, as though she were mounting St. Gudule's belfry
towers; and at the top of it entered a little chamber in the roof, where
one square unglazed hole that served for light looked out upon the canal,
with all its crowded craft, from the dainty schooner yacht, fresh as
gilding and holystone could make her, that was running for pleasure to
the Scheldt, to the rude, clumsy coal barge, black as night, that bore
the rough diamonds of Belgium to the snow-buried roofs of Christiania and
Stromstad.

In the little dark attic there was a very old woman in a red petticoat
and a high cap, who sat against the window, and pricked out lace patterns
with a pin on thick paper. She was eighty-five years old, and could
hardly keep body and soul together.

Bebee, running to her, kissed her. "Oh, mother Annemie, look here!
Beautiful red and white currants, and a roll; I saved them for you. They
are the first currants we have seen this year. Me? oh, for me, I have
eaten more than are good! You know I pick fruit like a sparrow, always.
Dear mother Annemie, are you b