moving over the empty spaces of the sea,
carrying it off quite well were it not for that indefinable suggestion
of a stagger; and I can think of all those ocean gods, in whom no
landsman will ever believe, looking at one another and tapping their
foreheads with just the shadow of a smile.

I wonder if they all scream--these ships that have lost their souls?
Mine screamed. We heard her voice, like nothing I have ever heard
before, when we rowed under her counter to read her name--the
_Marionnette_ it was, of Halifax. I remember how it made me shiver,
there in the full blaze of the sun, to hear her going on so, railing and
screaming in that stark fashion. And I remember, too, how our footsteps,
pattering through the vacant internals in search of that haggard
utterance, made me think of the footsteps of hurrying warders roused in
the night.

And we found a parrot in a cage; that was all. It wanted water. We gave
it water and went away to look things over, keeping pretty close
together, all of us. In the quarters the table was set for four. Two men
had begun to eat, by the evidences of the plates. Nowhere in the vessel
was there any sign of disorder, except one sea-chest broken out,
evidently in haste. Her papers were gone and the stern davits were
empty. That is how the case stood that day, and that is how it has stood
to this. I saw this same _Marionnette_ a week later, tied up to a
Hoboken dock, where she awaited news from her owners; but even there, in
the midst of all the water-front bustle, I could not get rid of the
feeling that she was still very far away--in a sort of shippish
other-world.

The thing happens now and then. Sometimes half a dozen years will go by
without a solitary wanderer of this sort crossing the ocean paths, and
then in a single season perhaps several of them will turn up: vacant
waifs, impassive and mysterious--a quarter-column of tidings tucked away
on the second page of the evening paper.

That is where I read the story about the _Abbie Rose_. I recollect how
painfully awkward and out-of-place it looked there, cramped between
ruled black edges and smelling of landsman's ink--this thing that had to
do essentially with air and vast coloured spaces. I forget the exact
words of the heading--something like "Abandoned Craft Picked Up At
Sea"--but I still have the clipping itself, couched in the formal patter
of the marine-news writer:

The first hint of another mystery of the sea came in