THE WINDOW-GAZER


CHAPTER I

Professor Spence sat upon an upturned keg--and shivered. No one had
told him that there might be fog and he had not happened to think of
it for himself. Still, fog in a coast city at that time of the year
was not an unreasonable happening and the professor was a reasonable
man. It wasn't the fog he blamed so much as the swiftness of its
arrival. Fifteen minutes ago the world had been an ordinary world.
He had walked about in it freely, if somewhat irritably, following
certain vague directions of the hotel clerk as to the finding of
Johnston's wharf. He had found Johnston's wharf; extracted it neatly
from a very wilderness of wharves, a feat upon which Mr. Johnston,
making boats in a shed at the end of it, had complimented him
highly.

"There's terrible few as finds me just off," said Mr. Johnston.
"Hours it takes 'em sometimes, sometimes days." It was clear that he
was restrained from adding "weeks" only by a natural modesty.

At the time, this emphasizing of the wharf's seclusion had seemed
extravagant, but now the professor wasn't so sure. For the wharf had
again mysteriously lost itself. And Mr. Johnston had lost himself,
and the city and the streets of it, and the sea and its ships were
all lost--there was nothing left anywhere save a keg (of nails) and
Professor Benis Hamilton Spence sitting upon it. Around him was
nothing but a living, pulsing whiteness, which pushed momentarily