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.
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