the little man's countenance and he
chuckled audibly. Then he pointed across the lake, chattering and
chuckling the while, and went through a series of strange motions,
spreading his legs farther and farther apart, pointing to the ground
between them, and concluded this exhibition with a sweeping motion of
his hands as if bidding some invisible presence of that enchanted place
God-speed across the water.

"Och--goo," he said, and shook his head and laughed.

"I know what he means," said Tom at last, with undisguised chagrin, "and
I'm a punk scout. I didn't notice anything at all. Come on. We've got to
swim across again--that's south, all right."

"What is it?" asked Archer.

"I'll show you when we get there--come on."

The little Swiss toymaker stood watching them and laughing with a
spasmodic laugh which he might have caught from his own wooden cuckoo.
When they reached the other shore Tom fell at once to examining a very
perceptible rift in the earth a few feet from the shore.

"Do you see?" he said, "we floated over on this piece of land. The tree
where we hung our coats was on the _real_ shore, and----"

"Go-od night, and it missed the boat," concluded Archer.

"This tree here is something like it," said Tom, "and that's where I
made my mistake. I ought to have noticed the trees and I ought to have
noticed the crack. Gee, if my scout patrol ever heard of that!
'Specially Roy Blakeley," he added, shaking his head dubiously.

It was indeed something of a "bull" in scouting, though perhaps a more
experienced forester than Tom would have become as confused as he in the
same circumstances. Perhaps if he had been as companionable with his
school geography as Archer had been with his he might have known about
the famous Lake Nonnenmattweiher in the silent depths of the Schwarzwald
and of its world-famed floating island, which makes its nocturnal
cruises from shore to shore, a silent, restless voyager on that black
pine-embowered lake.

As the boys looked back across the water they could see the little Swiss
toymaker still standing upon the shore, and looking at him through the
rescued glass (of which they were soon to make better use), Tom could
see that his odd little figure was shaking with merriment--as if he were
wound up.

CHAPTER XXVIII

AN INVESTMENT

Often, in the grim, bloody days to come, they thought of the little
Swiss toymaker up there among his windmills and Noah's arks, and of his
la