gateway, of the little walled town. Inside, doubtless, there
were high jinks going on; but the password was denied to me. I
could get on board a boat and row up as far as the curly ship,
but around the headland I might not go. On the other side,
of a surety, the shipping lay thick. The merchants walked on the
quay, and the sailors sang as they swung out the corded bales.
But as for me, I must stay down in the meadow, and imagine it all
as best I could.

Once I broached the subject to Charlotte, and found, to my
surprise, that she had had the same joys and encountered the same
disappointments in this delectable country. She, too, had walked
up that road and flattened her nose against that portcullis; and
she pointed out something that I had overlooked--to wit, that if
you rowed off in a boat to the curly ship, and got hold of a
rope, and clambered aboard of her, and swarmed up the mast, and
got into the crow's-nest, you could just see over the headland,
and take in at your ease the life and bustle of the port. She
proceeded to describe all the fun that was going on there,
at such length and with so much particularity that I looked at
her suspiciously. "Why, you talk as if you'd been in that
crow's-nest yourself!" I said. Charlotte answered nothing, but
pursed her mouth up and nodded violently for some minutes; and I
could get nothing more out of her. I felt rather hurt.
Evidently she had managed, somehow or other, to get up into that
crow's-nest. Charlotte had got ahead of me on this occasion.

It was necessary, no doubt, that grown-up people should dress
themselves up and go forth to pay calls. I don't mean that we
saw any sense in the practice. It would have been so much more