s. Another startling
moment is when the man turns back the grimy wool from the sheeps'
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 shock.
He can make a field of country sheep fly by merely announcing his
approach, but these town sheep come toward him with no promise of
gentle entertainment, and then a light from last year breaks upon
Porthos. He cannot with dignity retreat, but he stops and looks about
him as if lost in admiration of the scenery, and presently he strolls
away with a fine indifference and a glint at me from the corner of his
eye.

[Illustration: Porthos]

The Serpentine begins near here. It is a lovely lake, and there is a
drowned forest at the bottom of it. If you peer over the edge you can
see the trees all growing upside down, and they say that at night there
are also drowned stars in it. If so, Peter Pan sees them when he is
sailing across the lake in the Thrush's Nest. A small part only of the
Serpentine is in the Gardens, for soon it passes beneath a bridge to
far away where the island is on which all the birds are born that
become baby boys and girls. No one who is human, except Peter Pan (and
he is only half human), can land on the island, but you may write what
you want (boy or girl, dark or fair) on a piece of paper, and then
twist it into the shape of a boat and slip it into the water, and it
reaches Peter Pan's island after dark.

We are on the way home now, though of course, it is all pretence that
we can go to so many of the places in one day. I should have had to be
carrying David long ago, and resting on every seat like old Mr.
Salford. That was what we called him, because he always talked to us
of a lovely place called Salford where he had been born. He was a
crab-apple of an old gentleman who wandered all day in the Gardens from
seat to seat trying to fall in with somebody who was acquainted with
the town of Salford, and when we had known him for a year or more we
actually did me