at on her
back. And Rusty himself tumbled into the house and fell on top of
the heap.

As soon as they had picked themselves up, Rusty Wren and his wife
and Chippy, Jr., looked at one another for a few moments without
saying a single word.

Mrs. Rusty was the first to break the silence--if a house may be
said to be silent when there are six children in it, all clamoring
for something to eat.

"I knew we should have some sort of trouble if we took a stranger
into our home," she wailed.

"Why, what's the matter now?" Rusty inquired in surprise.

"Matter?" she groaned. "Here's this great lout of a boy inside our
house! And we'll never be able to get rid of him. Instead of his
helping us to feed our children, we shall have to feed him! And
now we are worse off than we ever were before."

XVIII

THE PUZZLE

Rusty Wren looked quite crestfallen as he listened to his wife's
wail. He wished that he had heeded her warning, when she declared
that his hiring a boy would certainly lead to trouble.

"What's the matter with you?" Rusty asked his helper, Chippy, Jr.
"When you first came to work for us you could slip through our
doorway easily enough. But now you're altogether too big."

Chippy, Jr., said that the entrance to their house must have
shrunk.

"How could it?" Rusty demanded impatiently.

"It rained last night," the youngster reminded him.

But Rusty Wren said, "Nonsense! The doorway's made of tin--not
wood. _You_ have grown--that's the whole trouble! And you've got us
into a pretty fix."

"I begin to think that it was all planned this way by his father,"
Mrs. Rusty told her husband, "so Mr. Chippy wouldn't have to take
care of his son. But I don't intend to adopt a big, overgrown boy
like him--not when I have six small children of my own!"

Chippy, Jr., couldn't help feeling both uncomfortable and unhappy.

"I want to go home!" he blubbered. "It's almost my bedtime. And my
father and my mother won't like it at all if I stay here all
night."

"Well," said Rusty Wren, "I don't know how you're going to leave
our house if you can't squeeze through the door. So I'll hurry
over and tell your father about this trouble, and he can break the
news gently to your mother."

Then Rusty went off, flying directly to the stone wall where the
Chippy family lived. And soon he was explaining to Mr. Chippy how
his son was inside their house and couldn't leave.

Now, Mr. Chippy was unusually mild mannered. Bu