“The Jane Ellen,” said the Princess softly, making the name long, as if she liked to say it, and the Others wriggled as if they liked to hear,—“the Jane Ellen was a very busy ship, and made important journeys, carrying splendid cargoes from port to port; but she sailed so fast when she was going straight on that the Captain always had time to stop on the way to attend to any little thing that needed it, or to be obliging and kind—like the time when they arranged about the Sailor’s Star. “Now if you had sailed on the Jane Ellen on one of the most interesting cruises she ever made, you would have come to a place where a long point of land ran out for miles into the sea. The point ended in a great rock that looked like the head and shoulders of a lion, coming out of the forest that covered the hills back of him, and roaring because he couldn’t get across to the point of a very large island that lay in the sea opposite. There was another great rock that made the point of the island (as if they were two gate posts), and this rock was the head of a man, frowning and dark; and one would hardly know which he was angriest with; the Lion, or any one who tried to pass through the gateway. “Besides the large island, there were a great many smaller ones—like a flock of ducks—and between them the water was shallow. So ships that wanted to pass that way had either to go through the dark Gateway, between the Roaring Lion and the Frowning Man, or else turn away to the south and sail miles and miles out of their course, around that whole flock of islands. And a great many ships did want to go that way; for it led to a land where the pearls were as large as gooseberries and all lovely tropical things grew because they couldn’t help it. “It isn’t pleasant to have even a rock man look as if he would like to bite off one’s bowsprit, or crowd one over into the jaws of a roaring lion; but they were only rocks with a good passage between, and no captain who was in the least bit of a hurry would have hesitated one minute, or even thought of sailing around those hundreds of islands on their account. But every captain who sailed the sea knew that, once inside that Gateway, he would come into the haunt of Torquillon, the Waterspout. And that was reason enough for any ship to go miles the other way.” (Torquillon was a stranger to the Others, but they nodded as if they thought it was an excellent reason. The story was beginning in a way that made them very quiet, not wanting to interrupt.) “Now when the Jane Ellen passed that way, if the Captain were not on deck and the Mate was commanding the ship, he liked to sail close to the Gateway instead of taking the shortest way to go around the islands, because he was not so old as the Captain, and he never had had so much as a glimpse of Torquillon. “This time that I’ve begun to tell you about, the Captain was taking a nap, and Taffy had things his own way as they came into that part of the ocean.