It was then that Greg said:

"Want—Simpson."

That frightened me more than anything almost, for Simpson was a sort of stuffed flannel duck-thing that he'd had when he was very little, and he hadn't thought of it for years. None of us ever knew why he called it "Simpson," but he adored the thing and made it sleep beside him in the crib every night. But that was when he was three, and "Simpson" had been for ages on the top shelf where we keep the toys that we think we'll play with again sometime before we're really grown up. We never have done it yet, but there are certain ones that we couldn't possibly give away, not even to the Deservingest poor children.

So when Greg said that, in a tired, far-off sort of way, it did frighten me, because I had heard of people dying when they were ravingly delirious. Greg wasn't raving exactly, but it was almost worse, because his voice was so small and different from his own dear usual one. When I told him I couldn't get Simpson I tried to make my voice sound soft and cooey like Mother's when she's sorry, but it went up into a queer squeak instead, and I couldn't finish somehow. Greg kept saying, "Simpson;—please—" and crying to himself.

I heard Jerry feeling around in the dark and then the click of his knife opening. I couldn't think what he was doing, but after quite a long time he pushed something into my hand and said:

"Does that feel anything like it?"

"Like what?" I said, but the next minute I knew.

It did feel like Simpson—soft and flannelly, with a round, bumpy sort of head at one end.

"Oh, how did you do it!" I said. "Oh, Jerry, you brick!"

"I chopped a big piece out of your skirt," he said. "I hope you don't mind. I happened to have the string off the sandwich bundle in my pocket, and I squeezed up a head and tied it."

Greg was a little frightened when Jerry leaned over him suddenly.

"It's just me, Greg," Jerry said; "just Jerry-o. Here's Simpson, old lamb."

I'd never heard Jerry's voice at all like that before. I don't know whether Greg really thought it was Simpson, but he took it and sighed—a long, quivery sort of sigh, the way very little children do when they're asleep sometimes.

Then there was no sound at all but the different horrid noises that the Monster made.

Presently I felt Jerry start, and then he shuffled back a little so that he was quite tight against my knees. I asked him what was the matter, and he said "Nothing." After a while, though, he said:

"Chris, I'd better tell you."

"What? Oh, what is it?" I said.

"Do you remember how the tide was when we came out?" he asked.

"Yes," I said; "on the ebb. Don't you remember the rocks at Wecanicut, with bushels of wet sea-weed hanging off?"

"Well?" Jerry said.

I didn't understand for a minute, then I whispered:

"Do—you mean—"

"A wave just hit my foot," said Jerry in a low voice.

The first thing that we did was a lot of quick figuring. We thought fearfully hard and remembered that Turkshead Rock was just coming out of water when we left Wecanicut at four o'clock, so that the tide must have been within about an hour of ebb. Therefore full flood would be at eleven o'clock. But we hadn't any idea of whether it was ten or eleven or twelve, because there was no light to see Jerry's watch by. He had just an ordinary Ingersoll, not the grand Radiolite kind that you can see in the dark and it was perfectly maddening to hear it ticking away cheerfully, and no good to us at all. Just then something cold wrapped itself around my ankle. It was the edge of another wavelet.

We knew that if the cave was going to be flooded we must get Greg out of it before the water came much higher, but it was still raining pitch-forks outside, and we didn't know whether to risk waiting a bit longer or not.

"Perhaps there's sea-weed and we can feel high watermark," I said. "Try, Jerry."

We felt all the way around the sides of the cave toward the bottom, but as far as we could tell there was no sea-weed at all.

"That doesn't help us much," Jerry said, "because we don't know whether the tide is really full now and has covered it, or whether it just doesn't grow here."

We curled our feet under us and waited. We could hear the water sloshing around very close to us. Once when I put out my hand it went right into a cold pool. It was then that Jerry had a most wonderful idea. I heard his knife snap open again and asked him what it was this time.

"If I take the crystal off my watch," he said, "I can feel where the hands are."

I heard the little clicking pop that the front of a watch makes when you pry it off, and I knew he was feeling the hands very gently.

"The little one's in line with the winder stem thing," he said, "and the big one—Chris, it's about twenty minutes of twelve. The water can't come any higher. We must have had the worst of it."

It was queer that I cried then, because I hadn't felt at all like crying when we thought that the cave would be flooded.

Greg had been quiet for so long that it frightened me suddenly, and I groped after him to be sure that he was all right. I found his hand, and I couldn't believe that it was really hot when ours were so cold. His forehead was hot, too, and dry, in spite of his hair being damp still from the rain. He curled his hand into mine and said very clearly:

"Will you please bring me a drink of water?"

It was perfectly awful, because he said it so politely and very carefully, as if he were trying not to bother somebody. And there was no drink to give him. I thought of the people in stories who lie on deserts and battle-fields burning in agonies of fever, but I couldn't remember reading about anybody dying of fever on a rock in the middle of the sea. I dipped my handkerchief in the pool just beside me and laid it, all dripping, on Greg's forehead. I didn't know whether it was a proper First Aid thing to do, but he seemed to like it and was still again, holding my hand. Presently he said:

"Mother, why isn't there a drink?"

"This is awful, Chris," Jerry said.

Then I thought of the rain-pools. There were lots, of course, in the hollows of the Monster, but we had nothing to scoop up the water with. Greg's forehead was just as hot as ever, and he thrashed about and hurt his shoulder and cried miserably.

I don't know how Jerry could have thought of so many things; for it was he who thought of very carefully breaking the bottom off the root-beer bottle and using it for a cup. Of course the bottom might have cracked all to pieces, but it was quite heavy and Jerry was very careful. It came off wonderfully well, though rather jaggy. Jerry tried to grind the cutty edges off by rubbing them against the rock, but it didn't work. Then we remembered being very thirsty once on a long picnic-walk ages ago, and Father wrapping his handkerchief around the top of the tin can the soup had come in and giving us a drink at a pump. So we knew that we could do that with the broken bottle. Jerry dodged out into the rain through the tide-pools and came back after a while with some water.

"I couldn't get much," he said, "because the place I found was very shallow, but I can go again."

I remembered reading in books that you mustn't give much water to fever-stricken people in any case. We lifted Greg's head up,—that is, Jerry did, while I held the root-beer bottle glass, and said:

"Here's the drink, Gregs, dear."

It was very hard to tell what I was doing, and some of the water trickled over the handkerchief and down the front of Greg's jumper. But he drank the rest, and said: "Thank you very much" in the same careful voice.

"Oh, I wish he wouldn't be so blooming polite!" Jerry said sharply, as we were laying Greg back again, and I felt something wet and warm splash down on my wrist. But I didn't tell Jerry I'd felt it.



CHAPTER X

If I wrote volumes and volumes I couldn't begin to tell how long that night seemed. It was longer than years and years in prison; it was as long as a century. I think Jerry slept a little, and perhaps I did, too, for when I peered out at the cave entrance again there were two or three bluish, wet stars in the piece of sky I could see, and the rain-sound had stopped. Jerry was huddled up at my feet with his dear old head propped uncomfortably against me. He was snoring a little, and somehow it was the nicest sound I'd ever heard. Greg's hand was still in mine, and it was not very hot.

Dawn always disappoints me a little. You think it's going to be perfectly gorgeous, and then it's usually nothing but one cold, pinkish streak, and the shadows all going the wrong way. But when I saw a faint wet grayness beginning to creep along the horizon beyond the Headland, I thought it was the most wonderful thing I'd ever seen in my life. The gray spread till the whole sky was the color of zinc, with the sea a little darker, and then one spikey yellow strip began to show on the sky-line. I could see Greg at last, with the jersey under his head, and the white brocade waistcoat all dark and stained at the shoulder, and his poor dear face ghastly white. And Jerry asleep, with the ruffle still pinned to his wet shirt and a big hole torn in the knee of his knickerbockers. And I saw the slimy pools that the tide had left beside us—it was on the ebb again—and the pieces of the root-beer bottle that Jerry had broken off, and the horrible, high, black head of the Sea Monster above us.

There was no boat of any sort to be seen, near or far away, but I woke Jerry so that we could both keep watch in case one came. Just as Jerry crawled out of the cave and stretched himself stiffly, Greg took his hand away from mine and blinked out at the sky, and said in almost his own voice:

"Have we been here all the time?"

"Yes, all the time, ducky," I said, and then I cried, "Don't try to move, Gregs!" for I saw him trying to squirm over.

He lay back and said "Why?" but then in an instant he knew why. I couldn't do anything but cuddle my cheek down against his, and he sobbed:

"Make me stop crying, Chris."

The light grew stronger and stronger till there were shadows among the rocks and Wecanicut came out green and brown. Jerry came back presently, and I wondered if he'd seen anything, but he said:

"Chris, I just wanted to ask you. How long does it take for a person to starve?"

I said days, I thought, and Jerry sighed a little and went back to his watching-place. Somehow I didn't feel very hungry, myself,—that is, not the kind of hungry you are when you've played tennis all morning and then gone in swimming. There was a sharp, sickish feeling inside me and my head felt a little queer, but it was not exactly like being hungry.

I think Greg's arm must have stopped hurting quite so badly, or else he was being tremendously spunky, because we talked a lot and I told him that Father would come for us pretty soon. I didn't feel at all sure of this, because I knew that Father would never have given up the Sea Monster the night before if he'd had any idea we were there. But it was so perfectly blessed to have Greg talking sensibly at all, even with such a wobbly sort of voice, that I didn't much care what I said.

All at once Jerry came tumbling around the corner, shouting:

"Oh, Chris, come quick! Hurry!"

I left Greg and ran after Jerry, and I'd been sitting so long humped up on the rocks that my knees gave way and I barked my shins against a sharp ledge. I didn't even know it until ever so long afterwards, when I found a bruise as big as a saucer and remembered then. Jerry didn't need to point so wildly out across the water; I saw the boat before he could say a word. It was a catboat, quite far off, tacking down from the Headland. The sail was orange, and we'd never seen an orange sail in our harbor or anywhere, in fact, so we knew it must be a strange boat.

Jerry pulled off his shirt like winking and stood there in his bare arms waving it madly. We both began to shout before the catboat people could possibly have heard us, but we thought that they might see the white shirt flying up and down. The boat was tacking a long leg and a short one. The long one carried it so far out that we thought it was going to cross the mouth of the bay and not come near enough to see us. Jerry stopped shouting just long enough to gasp:

"When she's all ready to go about on the short tack is the time to yell loudest."

But the next short tack seemed to bring the boat no nearer than before, and the long leg carried it so far away that it was no more use shouting to the orange sail than to a stupid old herring-gull.

"Could you wave for a bit, Chris?" Jerry said. "My arms are off."

So I took the shirt and waved it by its sleeves, and the catboat began another short tack. It was just then that we saw something black flap-flapping against the sail.

"They've tied a coat or something to the flag halyard, and they're running it up and down," Jerry said. "They're trying to get here, but they have to tack. Don't you see, Chris?"

Of course I saw, but I didn't blame Jerry for being snappy at the last minute.

The next tack showed very plainly that the boat was really coming to the Sea Monster, and somebody stood up in the stern and shouted. We shouted back—one last howl—and then stood there panting, because there was no use in wasting any more breath and our throats were quite split as it was. When the catboat came a little nearer we saw that there was only one man in it, and, sure enough, an old blue jersey was tied to the flag halyard. The man turned the boat around very neatly—I don't know the right sailing word for it—and anchored. Then he climbed into the dinghy that was trailing along behind and began rowing to the Sea Monster.

I sat down on the rock and I had to keep swallowing, because I felt as if my heart were bumping up against my throat. To save time, before the man landed, Jerry started to shout what had happened. There wasn't much left of his voice, but he managed to do it somehow.

"We've been here all night," he called huskily. "We came out to explore this thing, and our boat got away, and our little brother fell off the top and is hurt awfully, and" (this was just as the man climbed ashore on the sea-weedy rocks) "and we'd always called this place the 'Sea Monster' because it looked like one, but now we know it is one."

The man was looking at us very hard, particularly at me, and he said:

"The 'Sea Monster'!" Then he looked again and said "Oh!"

He was a nice tall man, with a brown, squarish face, quite thin, and twinkly blue eyes and a lot of dark hair that blew around like Jerry's. He looked from one to the other of us and nodded his head to himself. I suppose we did look very queer,—quite dirty, and Jerry with the tin-foil-buckled belt still around him and no shirt; and my bloomers dangling down like a Turkish person's because of the elastics having burst when I fell down.

"It seems," said our man, "that I have arrived in the nick of time to perform a daring rescue."

He said it in a funny make-believe way, as if he were doing one of our plays, and then suddenly the twinklyness went out of his eyes and he said:

"But take me to Gregory."

If we hadn't been so perfectly bursting with thankfulness and so tired of shouting and the cold and the whole hideous place, we should have wondered how on earth he knew Greg's name, because neither of us had mentioned it. But we didn't think of it then, and just snatched his hands and pulled him over the rocks, trying to tell him a little how glad we were to see him.

When he saw Greg, his face grew quite different—very sorry, and not twinkly at all and he went down on his knees (he couldn't have stood up in the back of the cave) and he said:

"Poor old man!" And then, "I wonder who had the worst night of it?"

We said, "Greg, of course." But our man said, "I wonder." Then he changed again, and instead of being all sorry and gentle, he got quite commanding and very quick.

"Chris, you stay here," he said. "Gerald, come with me,—and here, put this on."

He pulled off his gray flannel coat and tossed it to Jerry, and Jerry did put it on and ran after him, tucking up the sleeves. I saw them get into the dinghy and row back to the boat, and I said:

"Oh, Gregs, we're going home, we're going home!" and we both cried a little.

They came back after what seemed a long time, and our man said:

"While I'm fixing Gregory, you and Gerald tackle this."

It was half a loaf of bread and some potted beef done up in oiled paper, and I'm sure Jerry ate the oiled paper, too. I'd heard of starving people falling on food and rending it savagely, but I never knew exactly what rending was until we did it to the bread. We gave some of it to Greg, too, while our man was fixing him.

I never saw any one before who could do things so fast and so gently. He had nice, brown, quick hands, and he looked so grown up and useful. He'd brought a roll of bandage stuff—the kind with a blue wrapper that you keep in First Aid kits—and a book that had "Coast Pilot Guide and Harbor Entrances of New England" on the cover. I didn't see what he could want that for, except on the boat, till he put it under Greg's armpit and bandaged his arm across it to keep it steady. The white waistcoat was in our man's way, so he ripped it down the side and got it off entirely.

"I was an explorer," Greg explained shakily.

"He was Baroo, the Madagascar cabin-boy," Jerry said, gnawing the loaf, and I thought it seemed years ago that we had trekked across Wecanicut.

"I see," said our man, in his nice, kind, reliable way, and then he said to Greg, "I didn't hurt you much, did I, old fellow?"

And Greg shook his head, and said:

"Thank you for coming."

That was what we all felt, but none of us had put it so simply before.

"What's this?" the man said, as he was gathering up the rest of the bandages.

It was the Simpson-thing, and it did look very funny by daylight, I must say,—just a wob of blue flannel tied with a string. I was going to explain, but Jerry said, with his mouth full:

"Oh, just something we had," and stuffed it away in the kit-bag. He was quite red. Boys are funny sometimes.

"Now," said our man, "comes the embarkation, and I'm afraid I'll have to hurt you a little, Greg."

He picked Greg up in one swinging swoop, and I wished that Jerry and I had been strong enough to do that last night. Greg had only time for one gasp before he was quite comfortable against our man's shoulder. But he was brave, because it must have hurt like anything, even then, and I could see his jaw set hard. Jerry and I gathered up the kit-bag and the jersey and what was left of the skirt and followed along. Just beside the dinghy our man paused and looked all around at the ugly blackness of the Sea Monster and up to the jaggedy top of it. Then he looked down at Greg and smiled a little sorry smile, and said very slowly and gently:

"Ye be Three Poore Mariners."

Jerry and I stared at each other, and I said:

"You must know that song, too. We used to pretend being marooned, but we never thought it would really happen."

Then Jerry said suddenly:

"By the way, what's your name, sir?"

"You'll have to row, Jerry," said our man, "because I must keep the wounded just the way he is." Then he said:

"Some people call me Andrew, but my intimate friends call me 'The Bottle Man'."



CHAPTER XI

I thought that perhaps it might be a dream after all, because that's the way things happen in dreams, and that I would wake up and find it still night and the rain splashing down and poor Greg crying. But the dinghy was real and so were the slippy slidy wet rocks, and I had to watch what I was about and not go staring in astonishment at our man. We all had to be careful about the rocks, and that's why none of us said anything till we were in the dinghy, except for one gasp of astonishment.

"But how could you be?" Jerry and I asked together when we all were safely aboard, with our man in the stern holding Greg carefully.

"But how did you get un-oldened?" Greg asked.

"We thought you were a very old gentleman," I explained giddily.

"I am," said the Bottle Man. "Ancient."

"But what about your gray hairs?" Jerry demanded, tugging away at the oars.

"If you've more than one gray hair you've gray hairs," said our man. "I have eleven."

He ducked down his nice, dark, rumpled-up head for us to look, but I must say I couldn't see more than one little one all buried among the black.

"You're grown up, but you're not old at all," I said. "We've been imagining you as an aged old man with a long white beard."

"I never mentioned a long white beard," the Bottle Man said.

"Yes; but what about your tottering along on two sticks?" Jerry said suddenly.

But we had come alongside the catboat, and no one could talk for a little while until we were all arranged in the boat and our man had told Jerry and me to pull a mattressy thing out of the tiny little cabin and had laid Greg on it in the bottom of the boat. He gave him some stuff out of a little flasky bottle, too, and Greg sputtered over it and said "Ugh!" but afterward he said:

"It's nice and hot inside when I thought it had gone."

And we couldn't talk, either, when our man was hoisting the orange-painted sail and hauling up the anchor and running back and forth to pull ropes and things. But when he was settled at the tiller and all of us were cosy with sweaters and coats, Jerry asked him again.

"Why, you see," the Bottle Man said, "something had hit me very hard and for a long time all that I was able to do was to totter along on the two sticks."

"But what hit you?" I asked.

He dropped his voice, because Greg was actually asleep.

"An inconsiderate shell," he said.

For a minute, because I was so used to thinking of him on the lonely island, I imagined a big conch-shell being hurled at him from somewhere. Then Jerry and I both gasped:

"You mean you were in the war?"

"Exactly," said our man.

"And the bearded man was a doctor?" Jerry asked.

"That he was!" the Bottle Man said.

We both asked him questions at once, but he was dreadfully vague, and kept looking at Greg and the sail and the shore, but we managed to piece together that he'd been wounded twice and left for dead in No-Man's-Land (after doing all sorts of heroic things, we know) and finally sent home to America from a French hospital. We found out, too, that his aunt was the "good soul" he talked about in his letters, and that she half-owned the island and had a beautiful big old house on it where she made him come while he convalesced. It was very hard to find out all these things, because he would be so mysterious and kept saying "Ah!" and "That's another story!" He also wanted to hear all of our adventures, but we wouldn't tell him those until we'd heard some of his.

Jerry asked him suddenly about the scar where the sea-thing bit him, or stabbed him, or whatever it did, and our man twinkled and pulled up his sleeve. And there, just above his right elbow where the tan stopped, was a little white three-cornered scar, sure enough. Jerry looked and said "Oh!" and our man said "Ah-ha!"

And at the end of all the stories we realized that we didn't know, even now, how he happened to be sailing along just in time to rescue us.

"I sailed all the way from Bluar Boor," he said, "on purpose to see you. To tell the truth, I had designs on the 'Sea Monster' which will not be carried out now. I laid up last night inside the Headland breakwater and made an early start this morning for the last leg of the trip. I recognized the 'Sea Monster' a long way off, but I must say I was surprised when I saw Jerry's shirt signaling so distressfully. Of course I knew who you were at once, when you called the place the 'Sea Monster,' but Christine did stagger me for a minute."

"Stagger you?" I said. "Why?"

"I've been thinking you were 'Christopher' all this time, you see," he said, "but, being a man of infinite resource and unparalleled sagacity, I immediately perceived the true state of affairs."

"Are you a professor?" Jerry asked.

"Heavens, no!" our man laughed. "Why do you ask?"

"On account of your style," Jerry said. "It's so grand and stately. So are your letters, sometimes."

"I am but a poor bridge-builder," the Bottle Man said, "but I can turn words on or off as I want 'em, like a hose."

By this time the boat was almost in, and our man brought it up neatly to the float beside the ferry-slip, and some men came over and helped him to moor it. Then he got out and came back in a minute with the man who always meets the ferry in an automobile to hire. The man looked as if he were in a dazy dream, which I don't blame him for at all, because we did look quite weird. He and the Bottle Man lifted Gregg, mattress and all, and stowed him in on the back seat of the automobile. The rest of us perched on the front seat and the running-board, trying to conceal our strange appearance from the staring of quite a crowd which was gathering, as it was just ferry-time.

Our man said, "17 Luke Street, and go carefully." It surprised us for a second to hear him say our address as if he'd known it always, but then we realized that he had known it for quite a long time.

I think none of us will ever forget the way the house looked as we swung around the corner and came up Luke Street. Just the end of the gable first, behind the two big beeches in the front garden,—oh, we hadn't seen it for years and centuries,—and then the living-room windows open, with the curtains blowing, and the little box-bush that grows in a fat jar on the porch-steps. Mother was coming out at the front door, and she looked just the way she did when we got a telegram once saying that Grannie was very ill. Jerry jumped off the running-board before the automobile stopped, and he let Mother hug him right there in the middle of the path, which is a thing he generally hates. By that time our man and the chauffeur were lifting Greg and the mattress out, and Mother let go of Jerry and stood quite still, with her face all white and hollow-looking. We all began talking at once, and the Bottle Man managed to tell Mother more about everything in a few minutes than you would think possible.

He and the automobile man, who still looked flabbergasted, put Greg on the big bed in mother's room while she was telephoning to Dr. Topham. We all felt fidgetty and unsettled until Dr. Topham came, which was really very soon. I think he must have broken all the speed rules. Jerry and I, who had put on some other clothes, sat in the living-room with the Bottle Man while the doctor set Greg's arm, which was fractured. Mother stayed with Greg. The Bottle Man told us things about the war and his island, and he played soft, wonderful music on the piano to make us forget about Greg and the Sea Monster and all the awful things that had happened.



CHAPTER XII

It was the queerest topsy-turvy morning I ever spent. After Mother came down and told us that Gregs was fixed and that Doctor Topham had given him something to make him sleep, we all went in and had lots of breakfast.—Mother and the Bottle Man, too, for neither of them had had any. You would never have thought we'd eaten the bread and potted beef there on the Monster, if you'd seen the way we devoured the eggs and bacon and honey and toast that Katy and Lena kept bringing in. They both brought the things, because they were so glad to see us and so afraid that it had been their fault that we went to Wecanicut. But we told Mother that it wasn't.

While we ate. Mother told us everything that had happened at home. She and Father came in on the six o'clock train and found Katy and Lena quite worried because we hadn't come back yet, but no one got really frightened until later. Father thought of Wecanicut and went to the ferry to ask, but Captain Lewis wasn't there, and of course the cross new captain that we'd seen looking at the book hadn't even noticed us and wouldn't have known us if he had. Our nice Portuguese man remembered our going over and was perfectly certain that he'd seen us come back, too, which of course he hadn't. So, after setting the policeman and every one else to search town, Father and Captain Moss went to Wecanicut on the chance. They reached the point at a quarter after nine, which was when we saw the lights, and they never for a moment thought of the Sea Monster, because no one had missed the old dinghy from the ferry-slip and they didn't imagine that we could get there. They didn't find any trace of us at the usual picnic place on Wecanicut, because we had everything with us, and though some of the Fort soldiers searched, too, nothing could be found. Father had been up all night and was still out, telephoning to all sorts of places.

If I deserved any punishment for its being my fault, I think I had it when I thought of how hard Father had been working and how wretched and anxious they all were. I hadn't quite realized that before.

Strangely enough, right after breakfast Jerry and I began to yawn tremendously, and Mother bundled us off to bed. We hadn't had time to think of it, but of course we hadn't slept particularly well on the Sea Monster. Just as we were going upstairs, Aunt Ailsa came running in with her hat on, crying:

"Is Katy telling the truth?"

And then we both leaped on her from the stairs. When she ducked her head up from our hugs, the Bottle Man was standing in the doorway, looking queer.

"Ailsa!" he said; and that really did floor us, because we knew we'd never even mentioned her existence to him. She stood staring, and then put her hand up against her throat, exactly like somebody in a book.

"Andrew!" she said, in a faint little voice.

Mother looked at them, and then said:

"Bedtime, chicks! Come along!" and went up with us.

It was quite weird, going to bed at nine o'clock in the morning. We pulled down all the shades so we could sleep, though I don't really think we needed to, because I know that as soon as I shut my eyes I was sound asleep.

When I woke up the room was quite dim, and Mother and Father were standing at the door talking. Father looked awfully tired, but dear and glad, and he wouldn't let me tell him how sorry I was about it all. Mother said that even more surprising things had been happening, and that if I'd slept enough for a time, I'd better come down to supper. That was queer, too,—dressing in the twilight and coming down to supper, instead of to breakfast.

We all talked a lot at supper, of course, and people kept asking questions. I had to do most of the answering, because Jerry always left out the parts about himself, and yet it was he who did all the wonderful things. We had bottles of ginger-pop, because it was a sort of feast, and Father got up and proposed toasts, just like a real banquet. First he said:

"Jerry! I'm glad to have a son with a level head."

Then he said:

"Christine!" and looked at me very hard, till I wanted to turn away. But they all drank it just the same as Jerry's, though I didn't deserve it at all. Then Father held up his glass and said very gently:

"Greg!" And when I tried to drink it, the ginger-pop choked me, and Jerry banged me between the shoulders, which, of course, only made it worse, because it wasn't that sort of choke.

Then Jerry jumped up and said:

"We ought to drink to the Bottle Man, I think. And, by the way, 'Bottle Man' looks all right in a letter, but it's queer, rather, to say to you. Haven't you really a real name?"

Our man and Aunt Ailsa looked at each other as if they were going to say something, and then the Bottle Man twinkled, and said:

"Very soon you'll be able to call me Uncle Andrew."

This part seems to be nothing but explanations, which are horrid, but there were lots, and I can't help it. Of course Jerry and I sat staring in surprise, and there had to be explanations. And what do you think! Our own Bottle Man was that "Somebody Westland" that Aunt Ailsa had wept so about. The casualty list was perfectly right in saying that he was wounded and missing (though it came very late, because by that time he was in America), and she thought, of course, that he was dead, because she didn't hear from him. And he'd written to her from the French hospital and the letter never came. When he came back, all sick and wounded, to America, somebody who didn't know anything about it told him that Aunt Ailsa was going to marry Mr. Something-or-other, so our poor man went off sadly to his island and didn't write to her any more. He'd never heard of us, because of course her name isn't Holford. And she'd never heard of his aunt, nor Blue Harbor, nor the island, so of course she didn't know anything about it when we read his letters to her. Oh, it was very tangly and bewildering and it took lots of explaining, but at the end of supper there was just enough ginger-pop left to drink to both of them.

Afterwards she and Father played the 'cello and piano, because we asked them to, and the Bottle Man sat with his arm over Jerry's shoulders, watching, with the light on his nice, brown, kind face. And Father sat with his head tucked down over the 'cello, just the way I remembered there on the Sea Monster, and the candles shone on Aunt Ailsa's amberish-colored hair, and I thought she was the beautifullest person in the world, except Mother. I thought about a lot of things while the music went on, and wondered whether we'd ever want to picnic on Wecanicut again. But I knew we would, because Wecanicut is a kind, friendly, safe place (and we do go there now lots, only we don't look at the Sea Monster much). I thought, too, that perhaps if we'd never thrown the message in the bottle into the harbor, Aunt Ailsa and Uncle Andrew would never have been married and lived happily ever after,—that is, they've lived happily so far and I think they'll keep on. Because if we hadn't, the Bottle Man would never have come sailing down to see us, and he might still be thinking Aunt Ailsa had married the Mr. Thingummy, when she hadn't at all.

He was such a nice Bottle Man! I sat there on the couch and thought how splendid it would be when he was our own uncle, and I laughed when I remembered how we'd imagined that he was an ancient old gentleman. The wind began to rise outside. I could hear it whisking around and bumping in the chimney, and I thought how glad I was—oh, how glad, glad I was—that we were all at home, and I listened hard to the 'cello and tried not to remember the horrible old Sea Monster.

Mother slipped in and sat down beside me, and when the music ended, she said: "Greg wants to see the 'Bottle Man'." We asked if we might come, too, because we hadn't seen Greg since they carried him up to the house, all bloody and rumpled and dirty. So we all went up, and Mother tip-toed in first with the lamp. He looked almost quite like himself, with clean pajamas and his hair brushed and all the frightened, hurt look gone out of his face.

The Bottle Man (I almost forget to call him that, because we've been calling him Uncle Andrew for months) leaned over and said:

"Lots better now, old man?"

Greg said "Lots," and then, "But what I did want to ask you is, how you sailed all the way from the Mid-Equator to here in such a little boat?"

The Bottle Man laughed, and then said very soberly:

"But are you sure you measured it right? To-morrow I'll show you on the map."

We only stayed a minute, and then said good-night and went out. I was the last one, and just as I was going through the door, Greg said:

"Chris! Come back!"

So I went and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, and Greg put his good arm around my neck when I bent down.

"Do you know, Chris," he said, "sometimes that night I think I thought you were Mother. Oh, Chris, I do love you awfully much!"

And I was happier then than I'd been since—oh, it seemed centuries ago.

THE END