CHAPTER I


It began with Jerry's finishing off all the olives that were left,
"like a pig would do," as Greg said. His finishing the olives left
us the bottle, of course, and there is only one natural thing to do
with an empty olive-bottle when you're on a water picnic. That is,
to write a message as though you were a shipwrecked mariner, and
seal it up in the bottle and chuck it as far out as ever you can.

We'd all gone over to Wecanicut on the ferry,--Mother and Aunt Ailsa
and Jerry and Greg and I,--and we were picnicking beside the big
fallen-over slab that looks just like the entrance to a pirate cave.
We had a fire, of course, and a lot of things to eat, including the
olives, which were a fancy addition bought by Aunt Ailsa as we were
running for the ferry.

When we asked her if she had any paper, she tore a perfectly nice
leaf out of her sketch-book, and gave me her 3 B drawing-pencil to
write with. It was very soft, and the paper was the roughish kind
that comes in sketch-books, so that the writing was smeary and
looked quite as if shipwrecked mariners had written it with charred
twigs out of the fire. We'd done lots of messages when we were on
other water picnics, but we'd never heard from any of them, although
one reason for that was that we never put our address on them. We
decided we would this time, because Jerry had just been reading
about a fisherman in Newfoundland picking up a message that somebody
had chucked from a yacht in the Gulf of Mexico months and months
before.