So I put "Chris Holford, aet. 13," which I thought might look more
dignified and scholarly than "aged," and Jerry wrote "Gerald M.
Holford," and put "aet. 11" after it, but I'm sure he didn't know
what it meant until I did it. Then we stuck the paper at Greg, and
he stared at it ever so long and finally said:

"Ate eleven! He ate lots more than that; I saw him."

Jerry pounced again,--I was laughing too hard to,--and said:

"It's not olives, silly; it's an abbreviated French way of saying
how old we are."

Then I had to pounce on _him_, and tell him it was Latin, as he
might know by the diphthong. By that time Greg had written "Gregory
Holford, Ate 8," across the bottom, very large, and Jerry said he
might as well have put 88 and had done with it. We folded the paper
up in the tinfoil that the chocolate came in and jammed it into the
bottle and pounded the cork in tight with a stone. Greg was all for
chucking it immediately, but Jerry said it would have a better
chance if we dropped it right into the current from the ferry going
home. So we cocked the bottle up on a rock and went back to the
pirate-cave-entrance place to finish a game of smugglers.

Wecanicut is a nice place to smuggle and do other dark deeds in, and
I don't believe we'll ever be too old to think it's fun. This time
we cut the rest of the tinfoil into roundish pieces with Jerry's
jackknife, and stowed them into a cranny in the cave. They shone
rather faintly and looked exactly like double moidores, except that
those are gold, I think. We also borrowed Aunt Ailsa's hatpin with