ill give you a day's talk."

Mrs. Wilson would like to go, but she felt anxious about the boys. "They
have not been home for dinner or supper."

"But they came home for gingerbread," said Aunt Harriet. "I suppose they
didn't have too hearty a dinner at the Pentzes'."

"Joanna says they went off with a basket packed up for to-morrow," said
Gertrude.

"If the Pentzes did not live so far off, I would send up," said Mrs.
Wilson.

"They will be in by the time we are off, or soon after," said Mr.
Wilson. "It looks like rain, but it won't hurt us."

Mrs. Wilson and he went, but no boys appeared all the evening.

Aunt Harriet, who had not been long in the family, concluded this was
the way boys acted.

Jane sat up some time finishing a novel, and hurried off to bed,
startled to find it so late, and waking up Gertrude to say, "It is odd
those boys have not come home!"

Why hadn't they?

They couldn't.

This is what happened.

Wednesday afternoon, after school, the younger boys had gone to play
at the old Wilson house, far away at the other end of the Main Street,
beyond the Pentzes'. This was an old deserted mansion, where the Wilsons
themselves had lived once upon a time. But it had taken a fortune and
two furnaces to warm it in winter, and half a dozen men to keep the
garden in order in summer, and it had grown now more fashionable to live
at the other end of the town; so the Wilson family had moved down years
ago, where the girls could see "the passing" and Mr. Wilson would be
near his business. Of late years he had not been able to let the house,
and it had been closely shut to keep it from the tramps. The boys had
often begged the keys of their father, for they thought it would be such
fun to take possession of the old house. But Mr. Wilson said, "No; if a
parcel of boys found their way in, all the tramps in the neighborhood
would learn how to get in too." Still, it continued the object of the
boys' ambition to get into the house, and they were fond of going up to
play in the broad grassy space by the side of the house; and they kept
good oversight of the apple crop there.

On this Wednesday afternoon they were playing ball there, and lost the
ball. It had gone through a ventilation hole into the cellar part of the
house.

Now, everybody knows that if a boy loses a ball it must be recovered,
especially if he knows where it is. There is not even a woman so
stony-hearted but she will let in a troop of muddy