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.

Bébée 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 forever 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 Bébée 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.