This was horrid of him, but he made up for everything later on.

Our Captain Lewis was not in the pilot-house of the Wecanicut.  Instead there was a strange captain, a scraggly, cross-looking person, staring at a little book and not watching the people who came on board, the way Captain Lewis does.  Jerry and I sat on campstools on the windy side, and Greg went to watch the walking-beam, which he thinks will some day knock the top off its house.  It always stops and plunges down just when he thinks it surely will forget and go smashing on up through the roof.  He is quite disappointed that it never does.  It behaved perfectly properly this time and paddled the old ferry-boat over to Wecanicut as usual.

We went up the hot little road that goes from the landing, and then ran through a prickly, stony short-cut that leads among wild rose-bushes and sweet fern to our part of the shore.  There were tiny little wavelets splashing over the rocks, and you couldn’t think which was bluer—­the sea or the sky.  The first thing we did was to bury our bottle of root-beer in a pool up to its neck and mark the place with two white stones.  This is something we have learned by experience, for nothing is nastier than warm root-beer.  Then we put on the costumes and capered about a little.  I had a tight, striped football jersey, and my gym bloomers, and a black, villainous-looking felt hat; and Jerry had a ruffle pinned on the front of his shirt, and a wide belt with the big tinfoil-covered buckle that Mother made for us once, and a felt hat fastened up on the sides so that it looked like a real three-cornered one.  Greg had arrayed himself in his things, and he did look too absurd, with more than a foot of the brocade waistcoat dangling below the sash, the end of which trailed on the ground behind.

It gave us a queer, wild feeling, being there without the grown-ups, and we decided to tell them that as we’d proved we could do it, we might go again.  We never did tell them that, as it happens.

We all grew hungry so soon that we had lunch much earlier than the grown-ups would have had it.  The food Katy had fixed was wonderful, though rather squashed on account of all the costumes being on top of it in the kit-bag.  While we ate we organized the Submerged-City-Seeking-Expedition.  Jerry was “Terry Loganshaw,” in charge of the party, and I was “Christopher Hole, shipmaster,” and Greg was “Baroo, the Madagascar cabin-boy,” because we couldn’t think of what else he could be, with such clothes.

We tidied up all the picnic things so that there was nothing left, and put the root-beer bottle into the kit-bag, because it was a good one with a patent top.  The kit-bag we took with us for duffle, and we set off for the point.  We went by the longest way we could think of, to make it seem like a real expedition,—­’cross country and back again.  Jerry led us through the scratchy, overgrown part of Wecanicut, and we