Us and the Bottleman

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Us and the Bottleman

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Title: Us and the Bottleman
Author: Edith Ballinger Price
Release Date: June 22, 2004 [eBook #12681] [Date last updated:
January 9, 2005]
Language: English
Character set encoding: US-ASCII
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US and THE BOTTLE MAN
BY
EDITH BALLINGER PRICE
Author of "SILVER SHOAL LIGHT," "BLUE MAGIC," etc.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR
1920

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Greg rigged himself up as an Excavator We hoped the Bottle Man
would like the letter "Hang on, Chris!" Jerry said. "I can get it" "Ye be
Three Poore Mariners"
CHAPTER I
It began with Jerry's finishing off all the olives that were left, "like a
pig would do," as Greg said. His finishing the olives left us the bottle,
of course, and there is only one natural thing to do with an empty
olive-bottle when you're on a water picnic. That is, to write a message
as though you were a shipwrecked mariner, and seal it up in the bottle
and chuck it as far out as ever you can.
We'd all gone over to Wecanicut on the ferry,--Mother and Aunt Ailsa
and Jerry and Greg and I,--and we were picnicking beside the big
fallen-over slab that looks just like the entrance to a pirate cave. We

had a fire, of course, and a lot of things to eat, including the olives,
which were a fancy addition bought by Aunt Ailsa as we were running
for the ferry.
When we asked her if she had any paper, she tore a perfectly nice leaf
out of her sketch-book, and gave me her 3 B drawing-pencil to write
with. It was very soft, and the paper was the roughish kind that comes
in sketch-books, so that the writing was smeary and looked quite as if
shipwrecked mariners had written it with charred twigs out of the fire.
We'd done lots of messages when we were on other water picnics, but
we'd never heard from any of them, although one reason for that was
that we never put our address on them. We decided we would this time,
because Jerry had just been reading about a fisherman in
Newfoundland picking up a message that somebody had chucked from
a yacht in the Gulf of Mexico months and months before.
I wrote the date at the top, near the raggedy place where the leaf was
torn out of Aunt Ailsa's sketch-book, and then I put, "We be Three
Poore Mariners," like the song in "Pan-Pipes."
Jerry and Greg kept telling me things to write, till the page was quite
full and went something like this:
"We be Three Poore Mariners, cast away upon the lone and desolate
shore of Wecanicut, an island in the Atlantic Ocean, lat. and long.
unknown. Our position is very perilous, as we have exhausted all our
supplies, including large stores of olives, and are now forced to exist on
beach-peas, barnacles, and--and--"
"Eiligugs' eggs," said Greg, dreamily.
Jerry pounced on him and said they only grew on the Irish coast, but I
said: "All right! Beach-peas, barnacles, and eiligugs' eggs, of which
only a small supply is to be had on this bleak and dismal coast. Our
ship, the good ferry-boat Wecanicut, left us marooned, and there is no
hope of our being picked up for the next two hours. Any person finding
this message, please come to our assistance by dropping us a line," (I
must honestly say that this was Jerry's, and much better than usual) "as

the surf is too heavy for boats to land on this end of the island.
Signed:--"
"Don't sign it 'Christine'," Jerry said. "Put 'Chris,' if we're to be real
mariners."
So I put "Chris Holford, aet. 13," which I thought might look more
dignified and scholarly than "aged," and Jerry wrote "Gerald M.
Holford," and put "aet. 11" after it, but I'm sure he didn't know what it
meant until I did it. Then we stuck the paper at Greg, and he stared at it
ever so long and finally said:
"Ate eleven! He ate lots more than that; I saw him."