am; so the passage was achieved, and I stood
inside, safe but breathless at the sight.

Gone was the brambled waste, gone the flickering tangle of woodland.
Instead, terrace after terrace of shaven sward, stone-edged,
urn-cornered, stepped delicately down to where the stream, now tamed and
educated, passed from one to another marble basin, in which on occasion
gleams of red hinted at gold-fish in among the spreading water-lilies.
The scene lay silent and slumbrous in the brooding noonday sun: the
drowsing peacock squatted humped on the lawn, no fish leapt in
the pools, nor bird declared himself from the environing hedges.
Self-confessed it was here, then, at last the Garden of Sleep!

Two things, in those old days, I held in especial distrust: gamekeepers
and gardeners. Seeing, however, no baleful apparitions of either nature,
I pursued my way between rich flower-beds, in search of the necessary
Princess. Conditions declared her presence patently as trumpets; without
this centre such surroundings could not exist. A pavilion, gold topped,
wreathed with lush jessamine, beckoned with a special significance over
close-set shrubs. There, if anywhere, She should be enshrined. Instinct,
and some knowledge of the habits of princesses, triumphed; for (indeed)
there She was! In no tranced repose, however, but laughingly, struggling
to disengage her hand from the grasp of a grown-up man who occupied the
marble bench with her. (As to age, I suppose now that the two swung in
respective scales that pivoted on twenty. But children heed no minor
distinctions; to them, the inhabited world is composed of the two main
divisions: children and upgrown people; the latter being in no way
superior to the former--only hopelessly different. These two, then,
belonged to the grown-up section.) I paused, thinking it strange
they should prefer seclusion when there were fish to be caught, and
butterflies to hunt in the sun outside; and as I cogitated thus, the
grown-up man caught sight of me.

"Hallo, sprat!" he said, with some abruptness, "where do you spring
from?"

"I came up the stream," I explained politely and comprehensively, "and I
was only looking for the Princess."

"Then you are a water-baby," he replied. "And what do you think of the
Princess, now you've found her?"

"I think she is lovely," I said (and doubtless I was right, having never
learned to flatter). "But she's wide-awake, so I suppose somebody has
kissed her!"

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