e opened, perhaps, by another little boy many years afterwards.

But those yachts have nothing in their hold. Does any one return to
this haunt of his youth because of the yachts that used to sail it? Oh
no. It is the stick-boat that is freighted with memories. The yachts
are toys, their owner a fresh-water mariner; they can cross and recross
a pond only while the stick-boat goes to sea. You yachtsmen with your
wands, who think we are all there to gaze on you, your ships are only
accidents of this place, and were they all to be boarded and sunk by
the ducks, the real business of the Round Pond would be carried on as
usual.

[Illustration: The island on which all the birds are born that become
baby boys and girls (missing from book)]

Paths from everywhere crowd like children to the pond. Some of them
are ordinary paths, which have a rail on each side, and are made by men
with their coats off, but others are vagrants, wide at one spot, and at
another so narrow that you can stand astride them. They are called
Paths that have Made Themselves, and David did wish he could see them
doing it. But, like all the most wonderful things that happen in the
Gardens, it is done, we concluded, at night after the gates are closed.
We have also decided that the paths make themselves because it is their
only chance of getting to the Round Pond.

One of these gypsy paths comes from the place where the sheep get their
hair cut. When David shed his curls at the hairdresser's, I am told,
he said good-bye to them without a tremor, though his mother has never
been quite the same bright creature since; so he despises the sheep as
they run from their shearer, and calls out tauntingly, 'Cowardly,
cowardly custard!' But when the man grips them between his legs David
shakes a fist at him for using such big scissors. Another startling
moment is when the man turns back the grimy wool from the sheep's
shoulders and they look suddenly like ladies in the stalls of a
theatre. The sheep are so frightened by the shearing that it makes
them quite white and thin, and as soon as they are set free they begin
to nibble the grass at once, quite anxiously, as if they feared that
they would never be worth eating. David wonders whether they know each
other, now that they are so different, and if it makes them fight with
the wrong ones. They are great fighters, and thus so unlike country
sheep that every year they give my St. Bernard dog, Porthos, a