e Sea.

So take my advice, young sirs, the advice of a man many years
older than you bold young blades: don't you ever go listening
to a half-breed Peruvian that comes slinking to your window,
no matter how enticing may be his tales of treasure.

Your most faithful

BOTTLE MAN.

"_Do_ you think he dreamed it?" Jerry said.

"Whatever it was, he must have been glad to get back," I said,
switching off the light so that we could talk in the dark, which is
more creepy and pleasant.

"But the treasure!" Jerry said. "Do you suppose there ever was such
treasure in the world? That's something like! Imagine finding gold
trees and birds eating jewels on the Sea Monster! By the way, do you
know about 'Cornelia'?"

I said I thought she had something to do with sitting on a hill and
her children turning to stone one after the other, but Jerry said
that was Niobe and that it was she who turned to stone, not the
children. He has a fearfully long memory. So we put on the light
again and looked it up in "The Reader's Handbook," because we didn't
want to bother the grown-ups, and we found, of course, that she was
the Roman lady who pointed at her sons and said, "These are my
jewels!" when somebody asked her where her gold and ornaments were.
So naturally the Bottle Man didn't feel like repeating such a
complimentary thing, being an un-stuck-up person, but we did think
it was nice of his mother.

We put away the "Handbook" and made the room dark again and were
arguing over all the exciting places in the Bottle Man's story, when
Greg spoke up suddenly from the corner where we'd almost forgotten
him.

"If _I_ found a thing like those mer-persons," he said drowsily, "I
wouldn't let it bite me. I'd keep it in the bath-tub and teach it
how to do things."

"Like your precious toad, I suppose," said Jerry. "Don't be
idiotic."

So we all went to bed, and I, for one, dreamed about all kinds of
glittering treasures and heaps of jewels each as big as your hat,
and of our nice old Bottle Man, with his long white beard flowing in
the wind.

* * * * *

And now comes the perfectly awful part.

CHAPTER VII

I must say at the beginning that it was all my fault. Jerry says
that it was just as much his, but it wasn't, because I'm the oldest
and I ought to have known better. To begin with, Father had to go to
New York to give a talk at the American Architects' League, or
so