bits of string. So his unsympathetic manner did not add to my
depression.

I maintained a diplomatic blubber long after we had been packed
into our pony-carriage and the lodge-gate had clicked behind us,
because it served as a sort of armour-plating against heckling
and argument and abuse, and I was thinking hard and wanted to be
let alone. And the thoughts that I was thinking were two.

First I thought, "I've got ahead of Charlotte THIS time!"

And next I thought, "When I've grown up big, and have money
of my own, and a full-sized walking-stick, I will set out early
one morning, and never stop till I get to that little walled
town." There ought to be no real difficulty in the task. It
only meant asking here and asking there, and people were very
obliging, and I could describe every stick and stone of it.

As for the island which I had never even seen, that was not so
easy. Yet I felt confident that somehow, at some time, sooner or
later, I was destined to arrive.



A SAGA OF THE SEAS

It happened one day that some ladies came to call, who were not
at all the sort I was used to. They suffered from a grievance,
so far as I could gather, and the burden of their plaint was
Man--Men in general and Man in particular. (Though the words