



Produced by Al Haines.




[Illustration: Cover]



[Illustration: Cynthia Stockley]




                               WANDERFOOT

                            (THE DREAM SHIP)


                                   BY

                            CYNTHIA STOCKLEY

                   AUTHOR OF "POPPY," "THE CLAW," ETC




                        TORONTO: WILLIAM BRIGGS
                     NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
                                  1913




                            COPYRIGHT, 1913
                                   BY
                            CYNTHIA STOCKLEY



       "_Wanderfoot_" is published in England under the title of
                           "_The Dream Ship_"


                   The Knickerbocker Press, New York



                                   TO
                              MY DAUGHTER
                                DOROTHY




"O Beauty, I have wandered far;
  Peace, I have suffered seeking thee:
Life, I have sought to see thy star,
  That other men might see.

And after wandering nights and days,
  A gleam in a beloved soul
Shows how life's elemental blaze
  Goes wandering through the whole."




                                CONTENTS


                                 PART I

                                AMERICA


CHAPTER

      I. Secret Palaces
     II. Grey and Gold
    III. Fate's Winding Paths
     IV. A Skeleton and a Shrine
      V. Squirrel in a Trap
     VI. Kisses and Crosses
    VII. More Winding Paths
   VIII. Wounds in the Rain


                                PART II

                                 JERSEY

     IX. New Roads to Fortune
      X. Worry-Bells
     XI. A Ship on the Rocks
    XII. Children of Ishmael


                                PART III

                                 FRANCE

   XIII. The Ways of a Lover
    XIV. The Ways of Literature
     XV. Ways Sacred and Secular
    XVI. The Ways of Girls
   XVII. The Ways of Boys
  XVIII. The Way of The Sea
    XIX. The Way of Nemesis
     XX. The Ways of Life and Death
    XXI. Lonely Ways
   XXII. The Way of Love




                                 Part I


                                America



                               CHAPTER I

                             SECRET PALACES


"Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion."


The _Bavaric_ had been four fine September days at sea, and it was time
for the vague pain and melancholy that always haunted Westenra after
leaving Ireland to pass; yet it stayed with him as never before it had
stayed.  The voice of the Atlantic sang a dirge in his ears, and looking
at the long grey rollers he thought of his mother's hair which he would
never see again, of the mists that enveloped _Inishaan_ as Ireland
passed from sight, of the ghosts of Raths, and all grey things; and life
looked grey before him and dull.  It was as though the mists and shadows
of his land lay upon his spirit and would not be lifted.  More than ever
he was lonely, more than ever an exile, for now there was none but the
dead left to him in the land of his birth; the last root had gone, the
last frond been cut away.  His mother had died on the day he sailed from
New York to pay her his annual visit, and long before he reached
Queenstown she had been laid away to rest by his father's side in the
fair valley of Glendalough.

For awhile he had roamed about Ireland with something of the aimlessness
of a wounded creature, choosing wild solitary places where the sorrowful
beauty of lake and forest and mountain, so unique, so different in its
wistful allurement to any other scenery in the world, had seemed to
brood with him in his grief and lay with mysterious hands some healing
spikenard in his heart.  But the shadow of loneliness had not been
lifted from him.

He had never spent more than a few weeks of his yearly holiday with his
mother, and the rest of the two months in different parts of Europe, but
always he had felt her in his life; sitting by her fireside in her
beautiful little Carlow home she had constituted his bit of Ireland, his
share of the world. Now he was a lonely man without home or kin. The
ache of emptiness was in his heart as he stared at the few pale early
stars that had ventured forth into the evening sky.

Nothing was left in his life now except a child and a woman; but the
child was not even his own, and the woman was only a vision.  For years
she had come to him in his dreams, so many years that he could not
remember the first time, but usually she appeared when he was in Ireland
or coming away from it, never in America; and because he was fresh from
Ireland, and the supernatural element that is in the Celtic nature had
been recently renewed so that supernatural things still seemed to him
the real things of life, he thought of her now as if she were a real