Round Pond,
such big boats that they bring them in barrows and sometimes in
perambulators, and then the baby has to walk. The bow-legged children
in the Gardens are these who had to walk too soon because their father
needed the perambulator.

You always want to have a yacht to sail on the Round Pond, and in the
end your uncle gives you one; and to carry it to the Pond the first
day is splendid, also to talk about it to boys who have no uncle is
splendid, but soon you like to leave it at home. For the sweetest
craft that slips her moorings in the Round Pond is what is called a
stick-boat, because she is rather like a stick until she is in the water
and you are holding the string. Then as you walk round, pulling her,
you see little men running about her deck, and sails rise magically and
catch the breeze, and you put in on dirty nights at snug harbours which
are unknown to the lordly yachts. Night passes in a twink, and again
your rakish craft noses for the wind, whales spout, you glide over
buried cities, and have brushes with pirates and cast anchor on coral
isles. You are a solitary boy while all this is taking place, for two
boys together cannot adventure far upon the Round Pond, and though you
may talk to yourself throughout the voyage, giving orders and executing
them with dispatch, you know not, when it is time to go home, where you
have been or what swelled your sails; your treasure-trove is all locked
away in your hold, so to speak, which will be opened, perhaps, by
another little boy many years afterward.

But those yachts have nothing in their hold. Does anyone return to this
haunt of his youth because of the yachts that used to sail it? Oh, no.
It is the stick-boat that is freighted with memories. The yachts are
toys, their owner a fresh-water mariner, they can cross and recross
a pond only while the stick-boat goes to sea. You yachtsmen with your
wands, who think we are all there to gaze on you, your ships are only
accidents of this place, and were they all to be boarded and sunk by the
ducks the real business of the Round Pond would be carried on as usual.

Paths from everywhere crowd like children to the pond. Some of them are
ordinary paths, which have a rail on each side, and are made by men
with their coats off, but others are vagrants, wide at one spot and at
another so narrow that you can stand astride them. They are called Paths
that have Made Themselves, and David did wish he could see them doing