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.
CHAPTER IV
We all went to Wecanicut next day, which was a glorious one, and
when the food had disappeared we three walked up the point and wrote
to the Bottle Man from there. We'd decided that the paper with "17
Luke Street" on it was much too grand for "poore mariners" anyway,
so we'd just brought brownish paper that comes in a block. We told
the Bottle Man how wonderful we thought it was that he had found our
message, and how his letter had cheered our lonely watching for a
sail.
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