The envelope was a square, thinnish one, addressed in very small, black handwriting.

“It must be from The Bottle,” Jerry said; “otherwise they wouldn’t have thought you were a boy and put Christopher.”

I had been thinking just the same thing while I was trying to open the envelope. It was one of the very tightly stuck kind that scrumples up when you try to rip it with your finger, and we had to slit it with a fruit-knife before we could get at the letter. There were sheets of thin paper all covered with writing, and when Jerry and Greg saw that, they both fell upon it so that none of us could read it at all. I persuaded them that the quickest thing to do would be to let me read it aloud, and as we’d finished breakfast anyway, we each took our last piece of toast in our hands and went out and sat on the bottom step of the porch. I read:

“I told you it would go around the world!” Greg said, when I had finished, and Jerry and I were staring at each other.

“Well!” Jerry said at last. “What luck!”

“I should rather say so,” I said; “suppose a fisherman had found it, or no one at all.”

“Bless his old heart,” said Jerry, taking the letter.

I wanted to know why “old.”

“He must be ancient if he has to totter along on two sticks,” Jerry said. “Besides, he has a stately, professorish sort of style. Do you suppose he really does want us to write to him?”

“Of course he does,” Greg said; “he tells us to often enough. Think of being alone out there with savages, and that bearded chief coming with poison bottles and all.”

“Shut up, Greg,” said Jerry; “you don’t understand. There’s more in this than meets the eye, Chris. I didn’t get on to this crab salad business when you read it.”

Neither had I; in fact, I hadn’t got on to it until Jerry said it in proper English.

“He’s a good sort, poor old dear,” I said. “Why do you suppose they keep him out there?”

“He’s there of his own free will, right enough,” Jerry said.

But I didn’t think so.

We were still confabbing over the letter, and explaining bits to Greg, who was hopelessly mystified, when Mother came out to transplant some columbine that had wandered into the lawn. We did a quick secret consultation and then decided to let her in on the Castaway. So we bolted after her and took away the trowel and showed her the letter. She read it through twice, and then said:

“Oh, Ailsa must hear this, and Father!” But what we wanted to know was whether or not we might write to the Castaway, because we didn’t quite want to without letting her know about it. She laughed some more and said, “yes, we might,” and that he was “a dear,” which was what we thought.

We decided that we would write immediately, so Jerry dashed off to Father’s study and got two sheets of nice thin paper with “17 Luke Street” at the top in humpy green letters, and I borrowed Aunt Ailsa’s fountain-pen, which turned out to be empty. I might have known it, for they always are empty when you need them most. Jerry, like a goose, filled it over the clean paper we were going to use for the letter, and it slobbered blue ink all over the top sheet. But the under one wasn’t hurt, and we thought one page full would be all we could write, anyway. We took the things out to the porch table, and Greg held down the corner of the paper so it wouldn’t flap while I wrote. Jerry sat on the arm of my chair and thought so excitedly that it jiggled me.

But minutes went on, and the fountain pen began to ooze from being too full, and none of us could think of a single thing to say.

“If we just write to him ourselves,—in our own form, I mean,” Jerry said, “it’ll be stupid. And I don’t feel maroonish here on the porch. We’ll have to wait till we go to Wecanicut again, and write from there.”

I felt somehow the way Jerry did, so we put away the things again and went out under the hemlock tree to talk about the Castaway. Greg didn’t come, and we supposed he’d gone to feed a tame toad he had that year, or something. The toad lived under the syringa bush beside the gate, and Greg insisted that it came out when he whistled for it, but it never would perform when we went on purpose to watch it, so I don’t know whether it did or not.

Under the hemlock is one of the best places in the garden for councils and such. The branches quite touch the grass, and when you creep under them you are in a dark, golden sort of tent, crackley and sweet-smelling. You can slither pine-needles through your fingers as you discuss, too, and it helps you to think. We thought for quite a long time, and then I got out the letter and spread it down in one of the wavy patches of sunlight, and we read it again.

“Did you really think anybody’d find it?” Jerry asked suddenly, and I told him I hadn’t thought so.

“Neither did I,” he said; “let alone such a jolly old soul. Why, he’d be better than Aunt on a picnic.”

“I do wonder why he has to stay there,” I said.

“Perhaps he’s a fugitive from justice,” Jerry suggested; “or perhaps he’s a prisoner and the bearded person comes out with Spanish Inquisition things to make him confess his horrible crime.”

“He sounds like a person who’d done a horrible crime, doesn’t he!” I said in scorn.

“Well, then,” said Jerry, who really has the most inspired ideas for plots, “perhaps he’s an innocent old man whose wicked nephews want to frighten him into changing his will, leaving an enormous fortune to them. And they’re keeping him on the island till he’ll do it.”

“Well, whatever it is,” I said, “I don’t think he’s awfully happy somehow, and it’s nice of him to write such a gorgeous thing.”

So we both decided that whether he was staying on the island of his own free will, or in bondage, in any case it must be frightfully dull for him and that our letter ought to be interesting and cheerful.

Just then the hemlock branches thrashed apart and Greg crawled under with pine-needles in his hair. He sat back on his heels and blinked at us, because he’d just come out of the sunlight.

“I thought somebody ought to write to the Bottle Man,” he said, “so I did.”

“Well, I never!” Jerry said.

Greg fished up a bent piece of paper from inside his jumper and handed it to me.

“You can see it,” he said, “but not Jerry.”

“As if I’d want to!” Jerry said; but he did, fearfully.

Greg is the most unexpected person I ever knew. He’s always doing things like that, when everyone else has given up.

I spread his paper out on top of the other letter, and he sprawled down beside me, all ready to explain with his finger. What with his dreadfully bad writing and the sunlight moving off the paper all the time as the branches swayed, it took me ever so long to read the thing. This is what it was:

“Will it do?” Greg asked anxiously, when I folded it up. His eyes grow very dark when he’s anxious, and they were perfectly inky now. You never would have guessed that they were really blue.

“It’ll do splendidly,” I said, for I did think the Castaway man would like Greg’s letter tremendously.

“Better let me see it, my lad,” said Jerry, rolling over among the pine-cones and sitting up.

Greg got his precious letter with a snatch and a squeak, and scurried off with it. I pitched Jerry back on to the pine-needles, because I knew he’d never let the thing go if he saw it.

“Oh, let him send it,” I said. “It’s perfectly all right, and it will do the Bottle Man heaps of good.”

But Jerry growled about “beastly scrawls” and wasn’t pleased with me until supper-time.

Somehow we all began calling our island person the “Bottle Man” after Greg did, for it seemed as good a name as any for him, seeing that we didn’t know his real one. We read the letter from him after supper to Aunt Ailsa, and she laughed and liked it, and so did Father. We also asked Father what the Latin meant, and he made a funny face and said he’d forgotten such things, but then he looked at it again and told us it meant something like this:

“The happy hour shall come, all the more appreciated because it comes unexpectedly.”

So we went to bed thinking about our poor old Bottle Man consoling himself out there on his island with Latin quotations.

Greg was counting elaborately on his fingers, and said:

“I believe he answered everything in my letter, but please let me have it, because there are some things I need to work out myself.”

“Now for the business,” Jerry said. “This must be the whole sad story of his life,—there’s pages of it. Coil yourself up comfortably, Chris, and I’ll fire away.”

So I coiled up beside Greg on the Gloucester hammock, and Jerry began to read.

From my desolate island refuge I salute the Intrepid Trio! Good sirs, what you tell me of the “Sea Monster” makes my flesh creep and my hair stir with terror. A murderous bad place I should call it, and not one to trifle with. Yet it might well be, as you think, that the sudden-appearing cavern is the mouth of a pirate cave fairly bursting with treasure, and only now exposed to the eyes of such daring adventurers as yourselves by a trick of the elements. Strange things there be above and below the waters of the world—which serves to remind me of a tale you might not scorn to hear. You may take it or leave it, as you will, but at least the penning of it will pass some of my hours of banishment in a pleasant fashion.

In the year of grace 18— (I shudder to think how long ago) I was a bold youth of perhaps the age of the valiant Christopher.

Here Jerry paused to give a muffled hoot at me. I chucked a hammock cushion at him, and he went on:

My father’s house stood on a rambling street in an old waterside town, and from the windows of my room I could see the topmasts of sailing ships thrusting upward above gray roofs. Small marvel that my head should be filled with the ways of the sea and the wonder of it, or that I should spend long hours dreaming over books that told of adventures thereon. It was over such a book that I was poring one summer’s evening as I sat in the library bow-window. The breeze from the harbor came in and stirred the curtains beside my head, and brought with it the last westering ripple of sunlight and a smell of climbing roses. The book had dropped from my hand and I was well-nigh drowsing, when I saw, as plain as day, the queerest figure possible clicking open our garden gate. He looked to be some sort of South American half-breed,—swart face under rough black hair, and striped blanket gathered over dirty white trousers. Now I had seen many a strange man disembark from ships, but, never such a one as this, and when I saw that he was coming straight toward my window, I was half tempted to make an escape.

He leaned on the sill of the open casement with his dark face just below mine and began to pour out, in halting English, a tale which at first I had some trouble in understanding. The most that I made of it was that he, and he alone, knew the whereabouts of a city buried ages since under the sea and filled with treasure of an unbelievable description. But you may imagine that even the hint of such a thing was enough to set me all athrill, and I was not greatly surprised at myself when I found that I was following the queer, slinking figure down our bare little New England street.

He led me to a ship, an old brigantine heavy with age and barnacles and hung about with the sorriest gray rags of canvas that ever did duty for sails. No wonder that nine days out we lost our fore tops’l. But stay; I fear I go too fast! For you must know that I went aboard that brigantine, and once aboard I could not go ashore again, partly because the strange, ill-assorted crew detained me at every turn, and partly because the longing was so strong upon me to see the things I had read of so often. And that night found me still upon the vessel, nosing down to the harbor light, with the lamps of my father’s house winking less and less brightly on the dim shore astern.

Well, sirs, it would weary you to tell much of that voyage, and besides, many’s the time you yourselves must have weathered the Horn. For it was ’round Cape Stiff we went—no Panama Canal in those days—and I served a bitter apprenticeship on ice-coated yards, clutching numbly at battering sails frozen stiff as iron. It was Peru we were bound for,—Peru where the submarine city lay beneath uncounted fathoms waiting for us. The captain and I were the only ones Acuma, the half-breed, had taken into his confidence; all the others sailed on a blind errand, trusting to the skipper, who was a shrewd man and severe. And the brigantine wallowed around the Cape and toiled on and on up the coast, and every day Acuma grew more restless; every day he cast about the water with eyes that seemed to pierce to the very bottom of the Pacific.

One day of blue sky and little breeze, when we were pushing the brigantine with all sails set, Acuma flung himself at a bound to the quarterdeck, and a moment later the skipper shouted quick orders that the crew could not understand for the life of them. For to heave the ship to, just when we all had been whistling for enough breeze to give her something more than steerage way, seemed nothing short of insane. Acuma climbed to the maintop and looked at the coast of Peru with a telescope, and the captain took bearings with his instruments.

It was Acuma and I who went over the side in diving suits, for no others save the captain knew what we sought, as I have said. Down I went and down, with the weight of water crushing ever more strongly against me, till I stood upon the sea’s floor. That in itself was quite wonderful enough—the green whiteness of the sand and the strange, multi-colored forest of weed and coral through which my searchlight bored a single, luminous pathway. But right ahead, looming and wavering, seen for an instant, lost again when a deep vibration stirred and swayed the water, shone the faintly golden shape of a great portal. Acuma I had lost sight of, but I had no need to ask him what lay before me. The wild pounding of my heart told me that I stood at the gateway of the city that had been covered a thousand thousand years ago by the unheeding sea. Leaning at an angle against the tide, I struggled forward till the great gate towered above me, its arch half lost in the green, swimming shadow of the water. But as I flashed my light up across its pillars, it answered with the shifting sparkle of gems crusted thick upon it.

I walked then, breathless, into a street paved with rough silver ingots, each one surely weighing a quintal, between tremulous shapes of buildings which pointed lustrous towers upward through fathoms of green water. It was many minutes before I dared enter one of those great silent halls. Dragging my heavy leaden-soled boots, I pushed through a shapely silver doorway, and a fish darted past me as I entered. Who could imagine the wonder of that vast room! The mosaic that covered the walls and ceilings was of gold and jewels, not porphyry and serpentine, such as delight the wondering visitor to Venice, but precious stones—rubies, sapphires, emeralds, amethysts as richly purple as grape clusters, topaz as clear and mellow as honey.

Behind a traceried grillwork lay heaped a mound of treasures such as no human eye will ever see again. I lifted a little tree fashioned all of gold,—each leaf wrought of the metal—and strung with jewelled fruits on which ruby-eyed golden birds fed. In despairing rapture I clutched after a neck ornament hung with pendulous pearls as large as plums. But as I reached for it, I felt that something was looking at me from the corner. Not Acuma; no human being was in sight. Peering out through the glass visor of my helmet, I saw fixed on me from low down beside the doorway two inky, moveless eyes as large as saucers. They were not human eyes, nor did they belong to any sea creature I had ever beheld or read of. They were round and fixed, pools of bottomless blackness, staring at me through two varas of clear, swaying water. I took an uncertain step backwards, and as I did so I felt something soft and heavy laid slowly and slimily upon my shoulder....

Ah me, here is an interruption! A native child approaches, bearing as an offering a Lol Ipop (one of the native fruits). Just before he reaches me he falls face down, doubtless out of respect for my gray hairs, and, on arising, proffers me the Lol Ipop, now coated with sand. In this state I am expected to eat it, and, being in great awe and fear of the inhabitants, I proceed to do so, which incapacitates me for further epistolatory effort.

So, till I recover from the effects of my enforced meal, believe me your devoted correspondent,

THE BOTTLE MAN.