I should go down and establish myself upon the thing, and that the others
should visit me there from time to time, when we would sit round and
toil.

This houseboat was Ethelbertha's idea. We had spent a day, the summer
before, on one belonging to a friend of mine, and she had been enraptured
with the life. Everything was on such a delightfully tiny scale. You
lived in a tiny little room; you slept on a tiny little bed, in a tiny,
tiny little bedroom; and you cooked your little dinner by a tiny little
fire, in the tiniest little kitchen that ever you did see. "Oh, it must
be lovely, living on a houseboat," said Ethelbertha, with a gasp of
ecstasy; "it must be like living in a doll's house."

Ethelbertha was very young--ridiculously young, as I think I have
mentioned before--in those days of which I am writing, and the love of
dolls, and of the gorgeous dresses that dolls wear, and of the
many-windowed but inconveniently arranged houses that dolls inhabit--or
are supposed to inhabit, for as a rule they seem to prefer sitting on the
roof with their legs dangling down over the front door, which has always
appeared to me to be unladylike: but then, of course, I am no authority
on doll etiquette--had not yet, I think, quite departed from her. Nay,
am I not sure that it had not? Do I not remember, years later, peeping
into a certain room, the walls of which are covered with works of art of
a character calculated to send any aesthetic person mad, and seeing her,
sitting on the floor, before a red brick mansion, containing two rooms
and a kitchen; and are not her hands trembling with delight as she
arranges the three real tin plates upon the dresser? And does she not
knock at the real brass knocker upon the real front door until it comes
off, and I have to sit down beside her on the floor and screw it on
again?