ick
floor.

That bare room was a sad enough place sometimes, when the old women would
bewail how they starved on the pittance they gained, and the young women
sighed for their aching heads and their failing eyesight, and the
children dropped great tears on the bobbins, because they had come out
without a crust to break their fast.

She had been sad there often for others, but she had never been dull--not
with this unfamiliar, desolate, dreary dulness, that seemed to take all
the mirth out of the busy life around her, and all the color out of the
blue sky above. Why, she had no idea herself. She wondered if she were
going to be ill; she had never been ill in her life, being strong as a
little bird that has never known cage or captivity.

When the day was done, Bebee gave a quick sigh as she looked across the
square. She had so wanted to tell him that she was not ungrateful; and
she had a little moss-rose ready, with a sprig of sweetbrier, and a tiny
spray of maidenhair fern that grew under the willows, which she had kept
covered up with a leaf of sycamore all the day long.

No one would have it now.

The child went out of the place sadly as the carillon rang. There was
only the moss-rose in her basket, and the red and white currants that had
been given her for her dinner.

She went along the twisting, many-colored, quaintly fashioned streets,
till she came to the water-side.

It is very ancient there still, there are all manner of old buildings,
black and brown and gray, peaked roofs, gabled windows, arched doors,
crumbling bridges, twisted galleries leaning to touch the dark surface of
the canal, dusky wharves crowded with barrels, and bales, and cattle, and
timber, and all the various freightage that the good ships come and go
with all the year round, to and from the ZuyderZee, and the Baltic water,
and the wild Northumbrian shores, and the iron-bound Scottish headlands,
and the pretty gray Norman seaports, and the white sandy dunes of
Holland, with the toy towns and the straight poplar-trees.

Bebee was fond of watching the brigs and barges, that looked so big to
her, with their national flags flying, and their tall masts standing
thick as grass, and their tawny sails flapping in the wind, and about
them the sweet, strong smell of that strange, unknown thing, the sea.

Sometimes the sailors would talk with her; sometimes some old salt,
sitting astride of a cask, would tell her a mariner's tale of far-away
l