WANDERERS IN OCEAN PATHS.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XL, Issue 12538, 8 May 1915, Page 3 (Supplement)

WANDERERS IN OCEAN PATHS.

At least once in my life I have had the good fortune to board a deserted vessel-att sea. I say "good fortune" because it has left mo the memrrv of a singular impression. I have felt a ghost of the same, thing two or three tiems since then, when peeping through the doorway of an abandoned house, writes Wilbur Daniel Steele in Harper 1 - Magazine. Now that vessel was not dead. She was a. good vessel, a sound vessel even a handsome vessel, in her blunt-browed, coastwise way. She sailed under four lowers across as blue and glittering a sea as I have ever known, and there was not a point in her sailing that one could lay a finger upon as wrong. And yet, passing that schooner at two miles, 'one knew, somehow, that no hand was on her wheel. Sometimes I can imagine a vessel, stricken like that, moving over the empty spaces of tke sea. carrying it off quite well were it riot for that indefinable suggestion of a stagger: and I can think of all those ocean cods, in whom no landsman will ever believe, looking at once another and tapping their foreheads with just the shadow of a- smite.

I -wonder if they. all scream —these ships that have lost their souls ? Mine creamed'. We heard her voice, like nothing I have ever heard before, when we rowed under her counter to read her name —the Marionette 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 t'hat stark .fashion. And T 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 to-e-ether, all of us. In the quarters the table was .set for four. Two •men had begun to eat, .by the evidence ■ of the plates. Nowhere in the vessel was there anv sign of disorder, except one sea chest broken out., evidently-in haste. Her naners were gone and the stern •davit* were emntv. That is how. the case, stood that day. and that is how it has stood to this. I saw this same Marionette a week later, lied up to.a Hoboken dock, where she awaited news from her owners; but even there, m the nr'dst of all the water-front bustle. I could not set- rid of the feeling that she was still "very far. away—m a sort of shippish other world. The thins happens now and then. Sometimes half a dozen years will co by without a solitary wanderer of this .sort crossing the ocean paths, and thou in a single season perhaps several of them will turn up;-vacant waifs, impassive and mysterious—a quarter column of tidings tucked away of the second of the evening paper.