The Ship of Stars | Page 9

their
song again.
"Ah, you'll larn over to St. Ann's, being one to notice things." The
nearer he came to it, the more mysterious this new home of Taffy's
seemed to grow. By-and-by Humility let down the window and handed
out a pasty. Joby searched under his seat and found a pasty, twice the
size of Taffy's, in a nose-bag. They ate as they went, holding up their
pasties from time to time and comparing progress. Late in the afternoon
they came to hedges again, and at length to an inn; and in front of it
Taffy spied his father waiting with a farm-cart. While Joby baited his
horses, the sailor-boys helped to lift out the invalid and trans-ship the
luggage; after which they climbed on the roof again, and were jogged
away northward in the dusk, waving their caps and singing.
The most remarkable thing about the inn was its signboard. This bore
on either side the picture of an Indian queen and two blackamoor
children, all with striped parasols, walking together across a desert. The
queen on one side wore a scarlet turban and a blue robe; but the queen
on the other side wore a blue turban and a scarlet robe. Taffy dodged
from side to side, comparing them, and had not made up his mind

which he liked best when Humility called him indoors to tea.
They had ham and eggs with their tea, which they took in a great hurry;
and then his grandmother was lifted into the cart and laid on a bed of
clean straw beside the boxes, and he and his mother clambered up in
front. So they started again, his father walking at the horse's head. They
took the road toward the sunset. As the dusk fell closer around, Mr.
Raymond lit a horn lantern and carried it before them. The rays of it
danced and wheeled upon the hedges and gorse bushes. Taffy began to
feel sleepy, though it was long before his usual bedtime. The air
seemed to weigh his eyelids down. Or was it a sound lulling him? He
looked up suddenly. His mother's arm was about him. Stars flashed
above, and a glimmer fell on her gentle face--a dew of light, as it were.
Her dark eyes appeared darker than usual as she leaned and drew her
shawl over his shoulder.
Ahead, the rays of the lantern kept up their dance, but they flared now
and again upon stone hedges built in zigzag layers, and upon unknown
feathery bushes, intensely green and glistening like metal.
The cart jolted and the lantern swung to a soundless tune that filled the
night. When Taffy listened it ceased; when he ceased listening, it began
again.
The lantern stopped its dance and stood still over a ford of black water.
The cart splashed into it and became a ship, heaving and lurching over
a soft, irregular floor that returned no sound. But suddenly the ship
became a cart again, and stood still before a house with a narrow
garden-path and a light streaming along it from an open door.
His father lifted him down; his mother took his hand. They seemed to
wade together up that stream of light. Then came a staircase and room
with a bed in it, which, oddly enough, turned out to be his own. He
stared at the pink roses on the curtains. Yes; certainly it was his own
bed. And satisfied of this, he nestled down in the pillows and slept, to
the long cadence of the sea.
CHAPTER IV.

THE RUNNING SANDS.
He awoke to find the sun shining in at his window. At first he
wondered what had happened. The window seemed to be in the ceiling,
and the ceiling sloped down to the walls, and all the furniture had gone
astray into wrong positions. Then he remembered, jumped out of bed,
and drew the blind.
He saw a blue line of sea, so clearly drawn that the horizon might have
been a string stretched from the corner eaves to the snow-white
light-house standing on the farthest spit of land; blue sea and yellow
sand curving round it, with a white edge of breakers; inshore, the sand
rising to a cliff ridged with grassy hummocks; farther inshore, the
hummocks united and rolling away up to inland downs, but broken here
and there on their way with scars of sand; over all, white gulls wheeling.
He could hear the nearest ones mewing as they sailed over the house.
Taffy had seen the sea once before, at Dawlish, on the journey to
Tewkesbury; and again on the way home. But here it was bluer
altogether, and the sands were yellower. Only he felt disappointed that
no ship was in sight, nor any dwelling nearer than the light-house