Now from sitting so much in the porch and turning these things over in her mind, Dorothy had come to know the Admiral and the Highlander and Sir Walter Rosettes as well as she could possibly know persons who didn’t know her, and who couldn’t have spoken to her if they had known her; but nothing came of the acquaintance until a certain Christmas eve. Of course, nobody knew better than Dorothy what Christmas eve should be like. The snow should be falling softly, and just enough should come down to cover up the pavements and make the streets look beautifully white and clean, and to edge the trees and the lamp-posts and the railings as if they were trimmed with soft lace; and just enough to tempt children to come out, and not so much as to keep grown people at home—in fact, just enough for Christmas eve, and not a bit more.
Then the streets should be full of people hurrying along and all carrying plenty of parcels; and the windows should be very gay with delightful wreaths of greens, and bunches of holly with plenty of scarlet berries on them, and the greengrocers should have little forests of assorted hemlock-trees on the sidewalks in front of their shops, and everything should be as cheerful and as bustling as possible.
And, if you liked, there might be just a faint smell of cooking floating about in the air, but this was not important by any means, as it might happen at any time.
Well, all these good old-fashioned things came to pass on this particular Christmas eve except the snow; and in place of that there came a soft, warm rain which was all very well in its way, except that, as Dorothy said, “It didn’t belong on Christmas eve.” And just at nightfall she went out into the porch to smell the rain, and to see how Christmas matters generally were getting on in the wet; and she was watching the people hurrying by, and trying to fancy what was in the mysterious-looking parcels they were carrying so carefully under their umbrellas, when she suddenly noticed that the toes of the Admiral’s shoes were turned sideways on his pedestal, and looking up at him she saw that he had tucked his spy-glass under his arm, and was gazing down backward at his legs with an air of great concern.
This was so startling that Dorothy almost jumped out of her shoes, and she was just turning to run back into the house when the Admiral caught sight of her, and called out excitedly, “Cracks in my legs!”—and then stared hard at her as if demanding some sort of an explanation of this extraordinary state of affairs.
Dorothy was dreadfully frightened, but she was a very polite little girl, and would have answered the town pump if it had spoken to her; so she swallowed down a great lump that had come up into her throat, and said, as respectfully as she could, “I’m very sorry, sir. I suppose it must be because they are so very old.”
“Old!” exclaimed the Admiral, making a desperate attempt to get a view of his legs through his spy-glass. “Why, they’re no older than I am”; and, upon thinking it over, this seemed so very true that Dorothy felt quite ashamed of her remark and stood looking at him in a rather foolish way.
“Try again,” said the Admiral, with a patronizing air.
“No,” said Dorothy, gravely shaking her head, “I’m sure I don’t know any other reason; only it seems rather strange, you know, that you’ve never even seen them before.”
“If you mean my legs,” said the Admiral, “of course I’ve seen them before—lots of times. But I’ve never seen ’em behind. That is,” he added by way of explanation, “I’ve never seen ’em behind before.”
“But I mean the cracks,” said Dorothy, with a faint smile. You see she was beginning to feel a little acquainted with the Admiral by this time, and the conversation didn’t seem to be quite so solemn as it had been when he first began talking.
“Then you should say ‘seen ’em before behind,’ ” said the Admiral. “That’s where they’ve always been, you know.”
Dorothy didn’t know exactly what reply to make to this remark; but she thought she ought to say something by way of helping along the conversation, so she began, “I suppose it’s kind of—” and here she stopped to think of the word she wanted.
“Kind of what?” said the Admiral severely.
“Kind of—cripplesome, isn’t it?” said Dorothy rather confusedly.
“Cripplesome?” exclaimed the Admiral. “Why, that’s no word for it. It’s positively decrepitoodle—” here he paused for a moment and got extremely red in the face, and then finished up with “—loodelarious,” and stared hard at her again, as if inquiring what she thought of that.
“Goodness!” said Dorothy, drawing a long breath, “what a word!”
“Well, it is rather a word,” said the Admiral with a very satisfied air. “You see, it means about everything that can happen to a person’s legs—” but just here his remarks came abruptly to an end, for as he was strutting about on his pedestal, he suddenly slipped off the edge of it and came to the ground flat on his back.
Dorothy gave a little scream of dismay; but the Admiral, who didn’t appear to be in the least disturbed by this accident, sat up and gazed about with a complacent smile. Then, getting on his feet, he took a pipe out of his pocket, and lit it with infinite relish; and having turned up his coat-collar by way of keeping the rest of his clothes dry, he started off down the street without another word. The people going by had all disappeared in the most unaccountable manner, and Dorothy could see him quite plainly as he walked along, tacking from one side of the street to the other with a strange rattling noise, and blowing little puffs of smoke into the air like a shabby little steam-tug going to sea in a storm.
Now all this was extremely exciting, and Dorothy, quite forgetting the rain, ran down the street a little way so as to keep the Admiral in sight. “It’s precisely like a doll going traveling all by itself,” she exclaimed as she ran along. “How he rattles! I suppose that’s his little cracked legs—and goodness gracious, how he smokes!” she added, for by this time the Admiral had fired up, so to speak, as if he were bound on a long journey, and was blowing out such clouds of smoke that he presently quite shut himself out from view. The smoke smelt somewhat like burnt feathers, which, of course, was not very agreeable, but the worst of it was that when Dorothy turned to run home again she discovered that she couldn’t see her way back to the porch, and she was feeling about for it with her hands stretched out, when the smoke suddenly cleared away and she found that the inn, and Mr. Pendle’s shop, and Mrs. Peevy’s cottage had all disappeared like a street in a pantomime, and that she was standing quite alone before a strange little stone house.
Chapter II. The Ferry to Nowhere
Chapter II. The Ferry to Nowhere.
The rain had stopped, and the moon was shining through the breaking clouds, and as Dorothy looked up at the little stone house she saw that it had an archway through it with “ferry” in large letters on the wall above it. Of course she had no idea of going by herself over a strange ferry; but she was an extremely curious little girl, as you will presently see, and so she immediately ran through the archway to see what the ferry was like and where it took people, but, to her surprise, instead of coming out at the water side, she came into a strange, old-fashioned-looking street as crooked as it could possibly be,