t red trees and
the tall bragging of the coast date from its heroic past?

Story-writers have nearly always been the foes of maps, finding in them a
kind of cramping of their mental legs. And in consequence they have struck
upon certain devices for getting off the map and away from its precise and
restricting bigotry. Davy fell asleep. It was Davy, you remember, who grew
drowsy one winter afternoon before the fire and sailed away with the
goblin in his grandfather's clock. Robinson Crusoe was driven off his
bearings by stress of weather at sea. This is a popular device for eluding
the known world. Whenever in your novel you come on a sentence like
this--On the third night it came on to blow and that night and the three
succeeding days and nights we ran close-reefed before the
tempest--whenever you come on a sentence like that, you may know that the
author feels pinched and cramped by civilization, and is going to regale
you with some adventures of his uncharted imagination which are likely to
be worth your attention.

Then there was Sentimental Tommy! Do you remember how he came to find the
Enchanted Street? It happened that there was a parade, "an endless row of
policemen walking in single file, all with the right leg in the air at the
same time, then the left leg. Seeing at once that they were after him,
Tommy ran, ran, ran until in turning a corner he found himself wedged
between two legs. He was of just sufficient size to fill the aperture, but
after a momentary lock he squeezed through, and they proved to be the gate
into an enchanted land." In that lies the whole philosophy of going
without a map. There is magic in the world then. There are surprises. You
do not know what is ahead. And you cannot tell what is about to happen.
You move in a proper twilight of events. After that Tommy went looking for
policemen's legs. Doubtless there were some details of the wizardry that
he overlooked, as never again could he come out on the Enchanted Street in
quite the same fashion. Alice had a different method. She fell down a
rabbit-hole and thereby freed herself from some very irksome lessons and
besides met several interesting people, including a Duchess. Alice may be
considered the very John Cabot of the rabbit-hole. Before her time it was
known only to rabbits, wood-chucks, and dogs on holidays, whose noses are
muddy with poking. But since her time all this is changed. Now it is known
as the portal of adventure. It is the