ngs
were out of the common. Each house on its square island having its own
swing-bridge of planks, the men on the water had to push each bridge out
of the way as they reached it; but the trick was done with the nose of
the boat, and cost no trouble. Most of the toy bridges swung back into
place when the boats passed, but the one nearest us remained open, and
as we looked, walking on slowly, two tiny children returning from
school, clattered toward us in wooden sabots, along the narrow dyke.
Opposite the disarranged bridge they stopped, looking wistfully across
at a green-and-blue house, standing in a grove of pink-and-yellow roses,
shaded with ruddy copper beeches, and delicate white trees like young
girls trooping to their first communion.

Evidently this was the children's home, but they found themselves shut
off from it; and standing hand-in-hand, with their book-bags tossed over
their shoulders, they uttered a short, wailing cry. As if in answer to
an accustomed signal, a pink-cheeked girl who, of course, had been
cleaning something, came to the rescue, mop in hand. She touched the
bridge with her foot; the bridge swung into place; without a word the
dolls crossed, and were swallowed up in a narrow, sky-blue corridor.

We wandered on, turning our heads from one side to the other, I reveling
in the delight of the others. Though Aalsmeer is but a stone's throw
from Amsterdam, it seems as far out of the world as if, to get to it,
you had jumped off the earth into some obscurely twinkling star, where
people, things, and customs were completely different from those on our
planet.

If there had been only one of the queer island-houses to see, it would
have been worth a journey; but each one we came to, in its double street
of glass, seemed more quaint than that we left behind. Some were painted
green or blue, with white rosettes, like the sugar ornaments on
children's birthday cakes. Some were so curtained with roses, wistaria,
or purple clematis, that it was difficult to spy out the color
underneath. Some were half hidden behind tall hedges of double
hollyhocks, like crisp bunches of pink and golden crepe; others had
triumphal arches of crimson fuchsias; but best of all the island shows
were the dwarf box-trees, cut in every imaginable shape. There were
thrones, and chairs, and giant vases; harps and violins; and a menagerie
of animals which seemed to have come under a spell and been turned into
leafage in the act of