But more often, imagining herself a Princess, and the nursery a prison-tower from the loop-holes of which she viewed the great, free world, she liked to people the boats out of stories that Potter had told her on rare, but happy, occasions.  A prosaic down-traveling steamer became the wonderful ship of Ulysses, his seamen bound to smokestacks and railing, his prow pointed for the ocean whereinto the River crammed its deep flood.  A smaller boat, smoking its way up-stream, changed into the fabled bark of a man by the name of Jason, and at the bow of this Argo sat Johnnie Blake, fish-pole over the side, feet dangling, line trailing, and a silvery trout spinning at the hook.  A third boat, smaller still, and driven forward by oars, bore a sad, level-lying, white-clad figure—­Elaine, dead through the plotting of cruel servants, and now rowed by the hoary dumb toward a peaceful mooring at the foot of some far timbered slope.

In each of the houses across the wide river, she often established a pretend-home.  Her father was with her always; her mother, too,—­in a silken gown, with a jeweled chaplet on her head.  But her household was always blissfully free of those whose chief design it was to thwart and terrify her—­Miss Royle, Jane, Thomas; her teachers [as a body]; also, Policemen, Doctors and Bears.  Old Potter was, of course, the pretend-butler.  And Rosa, notwithstanding the fact that she had once been, while at Johnnie Blake’s, the herald of a hated bed-time went as maid.

Gwendolyn had often secretly coveted the Superintendent’s residence in the Park (so that, instead of straggling along a concrete pavement at rare intervals, held captive by the hand that was in Jane’s, she might always have the right to race willy-nilly across the grass—­chase the tame squirrels to shelter—­even climb a tree).  But more earnestly did she covet a house beyond the precipice.  Were there not trees there? and rocks?  Without doubt there were Johnnie Blake glades as well—­glades bright with flowers, and green with lacy ferns.  For of these glades Gwendolyn had received proof:  Following a sprinkle on a cool day, a light west wind brought a butterfly against a pane of the front window.  When Gwendolyn raised the sash, the butterfly fluttered in, throwing off a jeweled drop as he came and alighted upon the dull rose and green of a flower in the border of the nursery rug.  His wings were flat together and he was tipped to one side, like a skiff with tinted sails.  But when the sails were dry, and parted once more, and sunlight had replaced shower, he launched forth from the pink landing-place of Gwendolyn’s palm—­and sped away and away, due west!

But the view from the side window!

Beyond the line of step-houses, and beyond the buildings where the maids hung their wash, were roofs.  They seemed to touch, to have no streets between them anywhere.  They reached as far as Gwendolyn could see.  They were all heights, all shapes, all varieties as to tops—­some being level, others coming to a point at one corner, a few ending in a tower.  One tower, which was square, and on the outer-most edge of the roofs, had a clock in its summit.  When night settled, a light sprang up behind the clock—­a great, round light that was like a single shining eye.