A pavement is expected to behave in a calm and demure manner; even when it takes you up-hill it does this in the gentlest way. But this pavement, so soon as the little girl set foot upon it, at once changed to something like a switchback, and a switchback, mark you, she enjoyed when seated on a trolley at Shepherd's Bush Exhibitions; it was less agreeable to try to walk up and down the uneven parts here. Other people did not seem to experience her difficulties, and this she failed to understand until she observed that they went along on their hands and toes, pretending to have four legs; she tried the same method and found it made her back ache; discovered, too, that she could not see so much as when walking in the old way. Thus it was that she had reached the end of the road, where a steep ascent occurred that was like the side of a mountain, ere she noticed something strange and peculiar about the houses. "How very foolish of them to build in that way!" she cried. "They must be out of their senses." [Illustration] It was the more eccentric in that her own house so far as she had observed had not changed; thinking it over, though, she could not be quite sure. Here at any rate was every house upside down with the front door right away at the top, Virginia creepers growing downwards; at one house the painters were seeing to the front and their ladders came from the roof (which was the basement) nearly to the basement (which was the roof). A neat lawn hung out over the top of each house; it made her feel giddy to think of the risks of playing croquet there; she could not see how one would be able to make even the first hoop. Other things claimed her attention. There were carts with horses pushing them--she had often heard her father reprove her eldest brother for doing this in argument--the horses stood upright and wore silk hats in a rakish sort of way, sometimes lifting these on meeting another horse and taking cigars out of mouths. She spoke to a constable, who wore a helmet on each hand, and put an urgent inquiry. "Miaow!" said the policeman. "You didn't quite understand," remarked the little girl patiently. "I asked you if you would kindly tell me the way to get home to Wellington Road." "Ba, ba!" "Do please listen to me," she begged, "and tell me what I want to know. I think I've lost my way, and I'm so afraid that I'm going to cry." "Moo--oo!" said the constable. [Illustration: Instructing her dolly in the art of going off nicely to by-byes. _Painted for Princess Mary's Gift Book by M. E. Gray_] "Please, please," she cried, "please don't be silly. Why do you keep making noises like that instead of giving me a proper answer?" "Missy," he explained, "I'm a comic policeman. I'm not here to tell folk the way or to lock them up, or anything of that kind; I'm here to make people laugh." "You are not amusing me!"