sure I don't know," replied her father. "It seems like it. Perhaps
he did it for a joke."

"A very silly sort of joke, then," continued the girl snappishly, "to
make people keep a stupid old box for twenty years, when it was empty
all the time."

"D'you think, uncle," began Brian, "that there was something in it once,
but that it's been stolen?"

"That's impossible," was the answer. "No one could open the box without
breaking the seals on the padlocks, and there you saw them just now
intact, as they have always been. Supposing a thief had broken them,
he couldn't have made fresh ones unless he had had the old man's seal,
which I keep locked up in one of the drawers of my safe at the office."

"I suppose it would be impossible to break into the box through the
bottom or one of the sides?" said the boy thoughtfully.

"Oh yes," answered Guy. "You couldn't possibly do that. It's made of
solid oak, and see how strongly it's bound with iron. If you wanted
to break into it at all, you'd have to smash it all up with an axe or
sledge-hammer."

"I can't believe that anything has been stolen," said Mr. Ormond. "No; I
think old Uncle Roger must have done it as a queer sort of joke. He was
a strange old fellow."

"Well, it's a horrid, mean thing to do," cried Elsie, still half
inclined to give way to tears. "It's perfectly hateful. Now we shall
never have the pony."

The group continued to linger round the open box, as if still hoping
that some treasure might be found.

"I think you'd better all come back into the warm room," said Mrs.
Ormond. "It's very cold here.--Brian, will you put the box back in
its old place? Some one may fall over it in the dark."

The boy prepared to do as he was asked.

"Hullo!" he exclaimed. "There is something in the old thing, after all."

"What?" cried all three of his cousins at once.

Brian laughed, and held up something between his finger and thumb. "A
cork!" he answered.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER V.

A NAVAL DISASTER.

"A cork?" cried Ida. "Let me see it."

Brian handed over the small object which he had seen lying in a
corner of the empty box. It was an ordinary cork, such as would fit
a good-sized medicine bottle.

[Illustration]

"That's what we must have heard the other day rolling about when we
turned the chest up on its end," said Guy.

"What's the good of it? Throw it away!" cried Elsie, who could not get
the bank-notes out of her mind.

"I wonder how