“I suppose the children wound the clock up when they were playing with it up here and when it went off the striker beat against the head of the drum and played a regular tattoo.”

“Yes, I can see how that might happen,” replied Grandpa Ford.  “But what made the drum beat sometimes and not at others.  Why didn’t the alarm clock keep on tapping the drum all the while?”

“Because,” said Daddy Bunker, as the clock began to shake and tremble in his hand, “this is one of those alarm clocks that ring for a half minute or so, and then stop, then, in a few minutes, ring again.  That is so when a person falls asleep, after the first or second alarm, the third or fourth may awaken him.

“And that’s what happened this time.  The old alarm clock went off and beat the drum.  Then when we started to find out what it was all about, the clock stopped.  Then it went off again.”

“Another time Mr. Ghost fooled us,” said Grandma Ford, when her husband and son came down from the attic.

“Did any of you children have the alarm clock?” asked Mother Bunker, for the four oldest Bunkers were still awake.

“I was playing with it,” said Russ.  “I was going to make a toy automobile out of it, but it wouldn’t work.”

“I had it after him, and I wound it up and left it by the drum,” said Laddie.  “But I didn’t think it would go off.”

But that is just what happened.  Laddie had set the clock to go off at a certain hour, not knowing that he had done so.  And he had put it down on the attic floor so the bell-striker was against the head of the drum.

“Well, it’s a good thing it didn’t go off in the very middle of the night, when we were all asleep,” said Mother Bunker.  “We surely would have thought an army of soldiers was marching past.”

“And it wasn’t any ghost at all!” exclaimed Rose, as the grown folks turned to go downstairs.

“No, and there never will be,” said her mother.  “All noises have something real back of them—­even that funny groaning noise we heard.”

“But we don’t know what that is, yet,” said Russ.

“Go to sleep now,” urged his mother, and soon the awakened four of the six little Bunkers were slumbering again.

The next morning they all had a good laugh over the drum and the alarm clock, and Laddie and Russ had fun making it go off again.  The clock was one that had never kept good time, and so had been tossed away in the attic, which held so many things with which the children could have fun.

“Want to help us, Rose?” asked Russ after breakfast, when the children had on their rubber boots, ready to go out and play in the snow.

“What you going to do?” she asked.

“Make a snow man,” Russ answered.  “We’re going to make another big one—­bigger than the one the rain spoiled.”

“It’ll be lots of fun,” added Laddie.

“I’ll help,” offered Rose.

“Comin’, Vi?” asked Laddie.