cket, and lit it with infinite relish; and having turned up
his coat-collar by way of keeping the rest of his clothes dry, he
started off down the street without another word. The people going by
had all disappeared in the most unaccountable manner, and Dorothy could
see him quite plainly as he walked along, tacking from one side of the
street to the other with a strange rattling noise, and blowing little
puffs of smoke into the air like a shabby little steam-tug going to sea
in a storm.

Now all this was extremely exciting, and Dorothy, quite forgetting the
rain, ran down the street a little way so as to keep the Admiral in
sight. "It's _precisely_ like a doll going traveling all by itself," she
exclaimed as she ran along. "How he rattles! I suppose _that's_ his
little cracked legs--and goodness gracious, how he smokes!" she added,
for by this time the Admiral had fired up, so to speak, as if he were
bound on a long journey, and was blowing out such clouds of smoke that
he presently quite shut himself out from view. The smoke smelt somewhat
like burnt feathers, which, of course, was not very agreeable, but the
worst of it was that when Dorothy turned to run home again she
discovered that she couldn't see her way back to the porch, and she was
feeling about for it with her hands stretched out, when the smoke
suddenly cleared away and she found that the inn, and Mr. Pendle's shop,
and Mrs. Peevy's cottage had all disappeared like a street in a
pantomime, and that she was standing quite alone before a strange little
stone house.

CHAPTER II

THE FERRY TO NOWHERE

The rain had stopped, and the moon was shining through the breaking
clouds, and as Dorothy looked up at the little stone house she saw that
it had an archway through it with "FERRY" in large letters on the wall
above it. Of course she had no idea of going by herself over a strange
ferry; but she was an extremely curious little girl, as you will
presently see, and so she immediately ran through the archway to see
what the ferry was like and where it took people, but, to her surprise,
instead of coming out at the water side, she came into a strange,
old-fashioned-looking street as crooked as it could possibly be, and
lined on both sides by tall houses with sharply peaked roofs looming up
against the evening sky.

There was no one in sight but a stork. He was a very tall stork with red
legs, and wore a sort of paper bag on his head with "FERRYMAN" writ