I. THE BOY IN THE GATE-HOUSE.

II.  Music in the town square.

III.  Passenger’s by Joby’s van.

IV.  The running sands.

V. Taffy rings the church bell.

VI.  A cock-fight.

VII.  George.

VIII.  The squire’s soul.

IX.  Enter the king’s postman.

X. A happy day.

XI.  Lizzie redeems her doll and Honoria throws A stone.

XII.  Taffy’s childhood comes to an end.

XIII.  The builders.

XIV.  Voices from the sea.

XV.  Taffy’s apprenticeship.

XVI.  Lizzie and Honoria.

XVII.  The squire’s weird.

XVIII.  The barriers fall.

XIX.  Oxford.

XX.  Taffy gives A promise.

XXI.  Honoria’s letters.

XXII.  Men as towers.

XXIII.  The service of the lamp.

XXIV.  Face to face.

XXV.  The wreck of the “Samaritan”.

XXVI.  Salvage.

XXVII.  Honoria.

XXVIII.  A L’OUTRANCE.

XXIX.  The ship of stars.

THE SHIP OF STARS.

CHAPTER I.

THE BOY IN THE GATE-HOUSE.

Until his ninth year the boy about whom this story is written lived in a house which looked upon the square of a county town.  The house had once formed part of a large religious building, and the boy’s bedroom had a high groined roof, and on the capstone an angel carved, with outspread wings.  Every night the boy wound up his prayers with this verse which his grandmother had taught him: 

     “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
      Bless the bed that I lie on. 
      Four corners to my bed,
      Four angels round my head;
      One to watch, one to pray,
      Two to bear my soul away.”

Then he would look up to the angel and say:  “Only Luke is with me.”  His head was full of queer texts and beliefs.  He supposed the three other angels to be always waiting in the next room, ready to bear away the soul of his grandmother (who was bed-ridden), and that he had Luke for an angel because he was called Theophilus, after the friend for whom St. Luke had written his Gospel and the Acts of the Holy Apostles.  His name in full was Theophilus John Raymond, but people called him Taffy.