“Perhaps I did!” Raggedy Andy said, “We will look around the bend in the eave!”

“Oh dear!” he exclaimed when he had peeped around the corner of the roof, “the gutter ends here and there is nothing but a hole!”

“They must have scooted right into the hole,” Henny, the Dutch doll said.

Raggedy Andy lay flat upon the shiny tin and looked down into the hole.

“Are you down there, penny dolls?” he called.

There was no answer.

“I hope their heads were not broken!” Raggedy Ann said.

[Illustration:  In the gutter]

“I’m so sorry I scooted them!” Raggedy Andy cried, as he brushed his hand over his shoe button eyes.

“Maybe if you hold to my feet, I can reach down the hole and find them and pull them up again!” he added.

Uncle Clem and Henny each caught hold of a foot of Raggedy Andy and let him slide down into the hole.

It was a rather tight fit, but Raggedy Andy wiggled and twisted until all the dolls could see of him were his two feet.

“I can’t find them!” he said in muffled tones.  “Let me down farther and I think I’ll be able to reach them!”

Now Henny and Uncle Clem thought that Raggedy Andy meant for them to let go of his feet and this they did.

Raggedy Andy kept wiggling and twisting until he came to a bend in the pipe and could go no farther.

“I can’t find them!” he cried.  “They have gone farther down the pipe!  Now you can pull me up!”

“We can’t reach you, Raggedy Andy!” Uncle Clem called down the pipe.  “Try to wiggle back up a piece and we will catch your feet and pull you up!”

Raggedy Andy tried to wiggle backward up the pipe, but his clothes caught upon a little piece of tin which stuck out from the inside of the pipe and there he stayed.  He could neither go down nor come back up.

“What shall we do?” Uncle Clem cried, “The folks will never find him down there, for we can not tell them where he is, and they will never guess it!”

The dolls were all very sad.  They stayed out upon the shiny new tin gutter until it began raining and hoped and hoped that Raggedy Andy could get back up to them.

Then they went inside the nursery and sat looking out the window until it was time for the folks to get up and the house to be astir.  Then they went back to the position each had been in, when Marcella had left them.

And although they were very quiet, each one was so sorry to lose Raggedy Andy, and each felt that he would never be found again.

[Illustration:  Down the spout]

“The rain must have soaked his cotton through and through!” sighed Raggedy Ann.  “For all the water from the house runs down the shiny tin gutters and down the pipe into a rain barrel at the bottom!”

Then Raggedy Ann remembered that there was an opening at the bottom of the pipe.

“Tomorrow night if we have a chance, we dolls must take a stick and see if we can reach Raggedy Andy from the bottom of the pipe and pull him down to us!” she thought.