ree trials. Then, filling it with water from the spring, he carried it
back to camp, while Jan led the wet and dripping Trouble.

"Oh, my goodness! What's happened now?" asked Nora, as she saw the three
children coming into camp. "Did you go in swimming with all your clothes
on, Trouble?"

"No. I falled into de spwing, I did!"

"And the tramp got him out!" added Jan.

Then she and Teddy, taking turns, told what had happened. Mrs. Martin
scolded Trouble a little, to make him more careful the next time. Then
Grandpa Martin said:

"Well, there must be strangers on this island after all, though I could
not find them. They must be hiding somewhere, and I'd like to know what
for."

"Maybe they're living in gypsy wagons," suggested Jan.

"Or in a cave," added Ted. "They look as if they lived in a cave."

"There isn't any cave on the island, as far as I know," his grandfather
told Ted. "But I don't like those strange men roaming about our place
here. They may not do any harm, but I don't like it. I'll have another
look for them."

"So will I," added Teddy, but he did not say this aloud. Teddy had made
up his mind to do something. He was going to look for those men himself,
either in a cave or a gypsy wagon. Ted wanted to find the ragged
man--find all of them if more than one; and there seemed to be at least
two, for the one who had pulled Teddy out of the spring had spoken of
another--a "professor."

"What's a professor?" asked Jan.

"Oh, it's a man or a woman who has studied his lessons and teaches them
to others," answered her mother. "One who knows a great deal about
something, such as about the stars or about the world we live in.
Professors find out many things and then tell others--young people
generally--about them."

"I'm going to be a professor," said Teddy.

"Are you?" inquired his mother with a smile. "I hope you will get wise
enough to be one."

But Teddy did not speak all that was in his mind. If a professor was one
who found out things, then the small boy decided he would be one long
enough to find out about the tramps, and perhaps find the cave where
they lived, and then he could tell Jan.

When Trouble had been put into dry clothes and sent to sleep by his
mother's singing, "Ding-dong bell, Pussy's in the well," Jan and Ted sat
by themselves, talking over what had happened that day. Ted was making a
small boat to sail on the lake, and Jan was mending her doll's dress,
where a prickly briar bu