The brown house itself was the living image of a prim, old-fashioned bureau backed up bleakly to the street, with its piazza side yanked out boldly into the garden like a riotous bureau drawer, through which the Rising Sun rummaged every morning for some particular new shade of scarlet or yellow nasturtiums. As though quite shocked by such bizarre untidiness, the green garden ran tattling like mad down to the ocean and was most frantically shooed back again, so that its little trees and shrubs and flowers fluttered in a perpetual nervous panic of not knowing which way to blow. [Illustration: The blue ocean was the most wonderful thing of all] But the blue ocean was the most wonderful thing of all. Never was there such an ocean! Right from the far-away edge of the sky it came, roaring, ranting, rumpling, till it broke against the beach all white and frilly like the Grandmother-Lady's best ruching. It was morning when you saw the ocean first, and its pleasant waters gleamed like a gorgeous, bright-blue looking-glass covered with paper ships all filled with Other Boys' fathers. It was not till the first night came down--black and mournful and moany--it was not till the first night came down that you saw that the ocean was Much Too Large. There in your chill linen bed, with the fear of Sea and Night and Strangers upon you, you discovered a very strange droll thing--that your Father was a Person and might therefore leave you, but that your Mother was a _feeling_ and would never, never, never forsake you. Bruno-Clarice, slapping his fat, black tail against your bedroom floor, was something of a _feeling_ too. Most fortunately for your well-being, the Grandmother-Lady's house was not too isolated from its neighbors. To be sure, a tall, stiff hedge separated the green garden from the lavender-and-pink garden next door, but a great scraggly hole in the hedge gave a beautiful prickly zest to friendly communication. More than this, two children lived on the other side of the hedge. You had never had any playmates before in all your life! One of the children was just Another Boy--a duplicate of you. But the other one was--_the only original girl_. Next to the big ocean, she was the surprise of your life. She wore skirts instead of clothes. She wore curls instead of hair. She wore stockings instead of legs. She cried when you laughed. She laughed when you cried. She was funny from the very first second, even when the Boy asked you if your big dog would bite. The Boy stood off and kept right on asking: "Will he bite? Will he bite? _W-i-l-l_ he _bite_?" But the Girl took a great rough stick and pried open Bruno-Clarice's tusky mouth _to see if he would_, and when he _g-r-o-w-l-e-d_, she just kissed him smack on his black nose and called him "A Precious," and said, "Why, of course he'll bite."