they decided to do
nothing at all, and, as far as the present dramatic and inconvenient
historian knows, that is just what they are doing at the present time.
Here ends the swaggering story of the mellow and gruff shipwrecked
mariners."

"Is that all?" "What fun!" "Didn't the adjectives come in funny!" "Write
another one!" came the various comments.

"Hurrah for Mumsey!" shouted Archie. "You're a regular Alice in
Wonderland."

"I wish I were, and I would raise the wind," said Auntie Jean.

"Slang, madam!" both her sons instantly announced.

"Is it? Then I beg its pardon, and yours, and everybody's," answered
Auntie Jean, promptly. "No, Edna, I will _not_ write another one, till
the next time we are becalmed. Isn't there a sign of a breeze, Will?"

"None yet, but we are making way slowly, with the sculling and the
tide. We're half across the bay now."

"Guess this rebus," said Cricket, presenting a paper on which she had
been drawing for a moment. There was a capital letter B,--a very wild
and inebriated looking letter it was, too,--and beside it was another B,
with beautiful, regular curves, lying flat on its back.

"It's one word," hinted Cricket.

"'How doth the little busy B
Improve each shining hour,'"

suggested Auntie Jean, instantly.

"No, that's good, but it isn't right; it's what we are now."

"B-calmed," said Archie. "And you're right. That B needed calming badly,
you little Gloriana McQuirk." For every separate hair of Cricket's curly
crop, having been wet in her involuntary bath, and afterward rubbed dry,
stood out in a separate and distinct curl from all the others, making a
veritable halo around her head.

"This is the way you look, Cricket," said Archie, seizing a pencil, and
in a moment his clever fingers had drawn a head in which nothing was to
be seen save a very wide smile, and a cloud of hair.

"I look very well, then," said Cricket, calmly. "It's like all those
pictures in papa's 'Paradise Lost,' where the angels all have halos, you
know. It would be very convenient to have a halo, really, wouldn't it,
auntie? A saint could fry his own eggs right on his halo, for instance,
if he wanted to, couldn't he?"

"That _would_ be a practical use for a halo," laughed auntie. "And that
brings up a suggestion of more lunch. Let us eat up the fragments. It's
five o'clock."

"And here's a bit of a breeze coming," said Will, suddenly, wetting his
finger, and holding it up. "Whoop-la!