hores, and the iron-bound Scottish
headlands, and the pretty grey 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
lands and mysteries of the deep; sometimes some curly-headed cabin-boy
would give her a shell or a plume of seaweed, and try and make her
understand what the wonderful wild water was like, which was not quiet
and sluggish and dusky as this canal was, but was for ever changing and
moving, and curling and leaping, and making itself now blue as her eyes,
now black as that thunder-cloud, now white as the snow that the winter
wind tossed, now pearl-hued and opaline as the convolvulus that blew in
her own garden.

And Bebee would listen, with the shell in her lap, and try to
understand, and gaze at the ships and then at the sky beyond them, and
try to figure to herself those strange countries, to which these ships
were always going, and saw in fancy all the blossoming orchard province
of green France, and all the fir-clothed hills and rushing rivers of the
snow-locked Swedish shore, and saw too, doubtless, many lands that had
no place at all except in dreamland, and were more beautiful even than
the beauty of the earth, as poets' countries are, to their own sorrow,
oftentimes.

But this dull day Bebee did not go down upon the wharf; she did not want
the sailor's tales; she saw the masts and the bits of bunting that
streamed from them, and they made her restless, which they had never
done before. Instead she went in at a dark old door and climbed up a
steep staircase that went up and up and up, as though she were mounting
Ste. Gudule's belfry towers; and at the top of it entered a little
chamber in the roof, where one square unglazed hole that served for
light looked out upon the canal, with all its crowded craft, from the
dainty schooner yacht, fresh as gilding and holystone could make her,
that was running for pleasure to the Scheldt, to the rude, clumsy
coal-barge, black as night, that bore the rough diamonds of Belgium to
the snow-buried