! I am so sorry," cried Rose. "Don't you suppose we'll ever
see my watch and Laddie's pin again?"

"We will write a letter to Captain Ben at once," said Mrs. Bunker,
getting the writing pad and fountain pen out of her bag. "He has not
left Grand View, and he may have already found them both. But, of
course, we cannot be sure."

"He would know they belonged to Rose and Laddie, if he found them," said
Russ, trying to comfort the others.

"Yes. If he cleans up the house he might find them. But it is likely
that he will hire somebody to do that, and we cannot be sure that the
person cleaning up is honest."

"Oh, how mean! To steal Rose's watch and Laddie's pin!" cried Russ.

"What makes them steal, Mother?" queried Vi.

"Because they have not been taught that other people's possessions are
sacred," said Mrs. Bunker gravely. "You know, I tell all you children
not to touch each other's toys or other things without permission."

"Well!" ejaculated Vi, "Laddie took my book."

"I didn't mean to keep it," cried her twin at once. "And, anyway, it
wasn't a sacred book. It was just a story book."

"Stealing is an intention to defraud," explained their mother, smiling a
little. "But Vi's book was just as sacred, or set apart, to her
possession as anything could be."

"I--I thought sacred books were like the Bible and the hymn book,"
murmured Laddie wonderingly.

Which was of course quite so. It took Laddie some time, he being such a
little boy, to understand that it was the fact of possession that was
"sacred" rather than the article possessed.

However, Mother Bunker wrote the letter to Captain Ben, asking him to
hunt all about the bungalow for both the wrist watch Rose had lost and
the stick-pin Laddie was so confident now that he had left sticking in
the cushion on the bureau in the bedroom. She also wrote a letter to
Norah asking the cook to look for the lost articles.

"Now what will you do with them?" asked Vi, referring to the letters.

"Mail them," replied Mother Bunker.

"How will you mail them? Is there a post-box in the car?"

"No. But we will find a way of getting them into the mails," her mother
assured the inquisitive Violet.

"I know!" cried Russ. "I saw the mailsack hanging on the hook at the
railroad station down on the coast, and the train came along and grabbed
it off with another hook."

"That is getting the mail on to the train," said Vi promptly. "But how
do they get it off?"

When Mrs. B