“Where were they?” asked his wife,

“All the while they were right around the corner and just in the next street from where our auto was standing.”

“Oh, dear me!” cried Mrs. Bobbsey, “what a relief”

“I should say so!” agreed Mrs. Martin, who had gone to the hotel, where her friends were staying, to do what she could to help them.

“I’ll get a taxicab and bring them straight here,” said Mr. Bobbsey.

A little later Flossie and Freddie were back “home” again.  That is, if you call a hotel “home,” and it was, for the time, to the traveling Bobbseys.

“What made you do it?” asked Flossie’s mother, when the story had been told.  “What made you go after the stray cat?”

“It was such a nice cat!” said the little girl,

“And we wanted to see if it was like our Snoop,” added Freddie.

“Well, don’t do such a thing again!” ordered Mr. Bobbsey.

“No, we won’t!” promised Freddie.

“No, but they’ll do something worse,” said Bert in a low voice to his friend Billy, who had also come to the hotel.

So the little excitement was over, and soon the Bobbsey twins were in bed.  Not, however, before Nan had asked her father: 

“Where are you going to take us to-morrow?”

“To Mount Vernon, I think,” was his answer.

“Oh, where Washington used to live!” remarked Bert.

“Where—­” But right there Freddie went to sleep.

“Yes, and where he is buried,” added Nan.

And then she, too, fell asleep.  And she dreamed that Flossie and Freddie were lost again, and that she started out to find them riding on the back of a big cat while Bert rode on a dog, like Snap.

“And I was so glad when I woke up and, found it was only a dream,” said Nan, telling Nell about it afterward.

There are two ways of going to Mount Vernon from the city of Washington.  Mount Vernon is down on the Potomac River, and one may travel to it by means of a small steamer, which makes excursion trips, or one can get there in a trolley car.

“I think we’ll go down by boat and come back by trolley,” said Mr. Bobbsey.  “In that way we can see more.”

“I’d rather go on the boat all the while,” said Freddie.  “Maybe I could be a fireman on the boat.”

“Oh, I think they have all the firemen they; need,” laughed his father.

“Is Mount Vernon an old place?” asked Nan. as they were getting ready to leave their hotel after breakfast.

“Quite old, yes,” her father answered.

“And do they have old-fashioned things there, like spinning wheels, and old guns and things like those in Washington’s headquarters that we went to once?” Nan went on.

“Why, yes, perhaps they do,” her father said.  “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I was just thinking,” went on Nan, “that if they had a lot of old-fashioned things there they might have Miss Pompret’s sugar bowl and cream pitcher, and we could get ’em for her.”