nd it was, and held a great deal, though so
tiny. Blue and red, like gems. Then a white road ran, with wilful,
uncalled-for loops, up a steep, conical hill, crowned with towers,
bastioned walls, and belfries; and down the road the little knights came
riding, two and two. The hill on one side descended to water, tranquil,
farreaching, and blue; and a very curly ship lay at anchor, with one
mast having an odd sort of crow's-nest at the top of it.

There was plenty to do in this pleasant land. The annoying thing about
it was, one could never penetrate beyond a certain point. I might wander
up that road as often as I liked, I was bound to be brought up at the
gateway, the funny galleried, top-heavy gateway, of the little walled
town. Inside, doubtless, there were high jinks going on; but the
password was denied to me. I could get on board a boat and row up as far
as the curly ship, but around the headland I might not go. On the other
side, of a surety, the shipping lay thick. The merchants walked on the
quay, and the sailors sang as they swung out the corded bales. But as
for me, I must stay down in the meadow, and imagine it all as best I
could.

Once I broached the subject to Charlotte, and found, to my surprise,
that she had had the same joys and encountered the same disappointments
in this delectable country. She, too, had walked up that road and
flattened her nose against that portcullis; and she pointed out
something that I had overlooked--to wit, that if you rowed off in a boat
to the curly ship, and got hold of a rope, and clambered aboard of her,
and swarmed up the mast, and got into the crow's-nest, you could just
see over the headland, and take in at your ease the life and bustle of
the port. She proceeded to describe all the fun that was going on there,
at such length and with so much particularity that I looked at her
suspiciously. "Why, you talk as if you'd been in that crow's-nest
yourself!" I said. Charlotte answered nothing, but pursed her mouth up
and nodded violently for some minutes; and I could get nothing more out
of her. I felt rather hurt. Evidently she had managed, somehow or other,
to get up into that crow's-nest. Charlotte had got ahead of me on this
occasion.

It was necessary, no doubt, that grownup people should dress themselves
up and go forth to pay calls. I don't mean that we saw any sense in the
practice. It would have been so much more reasonable to stay at home in
your old clothes and