We piped our spring too--a beauty--up through the dairy cellar to the kitchen, and Caliban was saved many a weary trip. Some years afterward I took my chance during another absence of the lord of the Island, and a hurried and astonished set of plumbers installed a luxurious bathroom in either ell of the cottage--a surprise for his birthday. Profiting by a winter in Bermuda, I copied their roof reservoirs, allowing one to each ell, sanded without, whitewashed within, an architectural measure which made the skyline even more rocky and wild, in appearance, from the water. Before we left, that autumn, we planted fifty evergreens, pines, hemlocks and spruces, in a broad belt just opposite the Island, masking it completely from the shore, and hardly a year passed after that without thickening and lengthening that concealing wall. Oh, we guarded our jewel, I can tell you! It was that summer, I think, that Whistler came to us and drew that series of sepia sketches that frames the big fireplace. They are on the plaster itself--a sort of exquisite fresco--and Venice sails, Holland wind-mills and London docks cluster round the faded bricks with an indescribably fascinating effect. At my urgent request I was allowed to protect them with thin tiles of glass riveted through the corners into the plaster: how the collectors' mouths water at the sight of them! Stevenson came a few years later: all the quaint comforts and intimate beauties hidden away behind the boulders plainly caught his elfish, childlike fancy--it was he who made the little grotto beyond the asparagus bed, lined the pool in it with unusual shells and coloured pebbles, fitted odd bits of looking-glass here and there, and wrote a poem on a smooth stone at the door for little Mary, to whom he dedicated it. "The purple pool of mussel shells, All full of salty ocean smells, The coral branches in the wall-- And you the mermaid queen of all ..." She used to recite it all very charmingly. Roger never wanted it printed in the _Child's Garden of Verses_, where it properly belongs--one of the best of them, in my opinion. He and Margarita talked together by the hour and I have seen his dog-like brown eyes fixed on her an hour at a time. I asked him once if he intended to "put her in a story"--the quaint query of the layman, so strangely irritating to the book-man--and he shook his loose-locked head slowly. "They say I can't do women, you know," he said, "and nobody would believe her if I put her in, she's too artistically effective." And here am I doing it! Fools rush in ...