One day, while rowing her leaky old punt on the Quincunx lake, Maria determines to explore the small island and its ruin, known as Mistress Masham's Repose. Family history has it that a seventeenth-century duchess, one of Maria's ancestors, had constructed this little temple so that she could take a quiet cup of tea with some of her illustrious houseguests: Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, and, perhaps, Jonathan Swift himself, whose satire, Gulliver's Travels (1726) provides the basis for White's story.
Pretending to be a pirate, Maria rows to the island, hacks through the undergrowth, and, to her surprise, emerges onto a carefully tended lawn. To her further amazement, she finds that the temple is not a ruin at all, but a shipshape, tidy building. Following a tiny pathway, Maria quickly discovers seveninch-high doorways cut into.....
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