The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Window-Gazer, by Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: The Window-Gazer

Author: Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

Posting Date: July 23, 2009 [EBook #4284]
Release Date: July, 2003
First Posted: December 30, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WINDOW-GAZER ***

Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.

THE WINDOW-GAZER

ISABEL ECCLESTONE MACKAY

So in ye matere of Life's goodlie showe
Some buy what doth them plese.
While others stand withoute and gaze thereinne--
Your eare, good folk, for these!
--OLD ENGLISH RHYME.

THE

WINDOW-GAZER

BY

ISABEL ECCLESTONE MACKAY

AUTHOR OF "MIST OF MORNING," "UP THE HILL AND OVER,"
"THE SHINING SHIP," ETC.

THE WINDOW-GAZER

CHAPTER I

Professor Spence sat upon an upturned keg--and shivered. No one had
told him that there might be fog and he had not happened to think of it
for himself. Still, fog in a coast city at that time of the year was
not an unreasonable happening and the professor was a reasonable man.
It wasn't the fog he blamed so much as the swiftness of its arrival.
Fifteen minutes ago the world had been an ordinary world. He had walked
about in it freely, if somewhat irritably, following certain vague
directions of the hotel clerk as to the finding of Johnston's wharf. He
had found Johnston's wharf; extracted it neatly from a very wilderness
of wharves, a feat upon which Mr. Johnston, making boats in a shed at
the end of it, had complimented him highly.

"There's terrible few as finds me just off," said Mr. Johnston. "Hours
it takes 'em sometimes, sometimes days." It was clear that he was
restrained from adding "weeks" only by a natural modesty.

At the time, this emphasizing of the wharf's seclusion had seemed
extravagant, but now the professor wasn't so sure. For the wharf had
again mysteriously lost itself. And Mr. Johnston had lost himself, and
the city and the streets of it, and the sea and its ships were all
lost--there was nothing