lane,--or rather a footpath or cowpath, bordered with cornfields
and orchards. We were still on home ground, for my father's
vegetable garden and orchard were here. After a long straight
stretch, the path suddenly took an
abrupt turn, widening into a cart road, then to a tumble-down
wharf, and there was the river!

An "arm of the sea" I was told that our river was, and it did
seem to reach around the town and hold it in a liquid embrace.
Twice a day the tide came in and filled its muddy bed with a
sparkling flood. So it was a river only half the time, but at
high tide it was a river indeed; all that a child could wish,
with its boats and its sloops, and now and then that most
available craft for a crew of children--a gundalow. We easily
transformed the spelling into "gondola," and in fancy were afloat
on Venetian waters, under some overhanging balcony, perhaps at
the very Palace of the Doges,--willingly blind to the reality of
a mudscow leaning against some rickety wharf posts, covered with
barnacles.

Sometimes a neighbor boy who was the fortunate owner of a boat
would row us down the river a fearful, because a forbidden, joy.
The widening waters made us tremble with dread and longing for
what might be beyond; for when we had passed under the piers of
the bridge, the estuary broadened into the harbor and the open
sea. Then somebody on board would tell a story of children who
had drifted away beyond the harbor-bar and the light-house, and
were drowned; and our boyish helmsman would begin to look grave
and anxious, and would turn his boat and row us back swiftly to
the safe gundalow and tumbledown wharf.