pposed, but his brother.

"Why, Laddie!" he exclaimed, shaking the younger boy. "If you don't stop
I'll have to get out and sleep on the floor."

"Oh!" gasped Laddie. "Am I sleeping?"

"Well, you're not now, I guess. But you were sleeping--and kicking,
too."

"Oh!" said Laddie again. "I thought that old calf was pulling me down
into the mud to take a bath. That--that must be a riddle, Russ."

"What's a riddle?" asked his brother, yawning.

"When is a dream not a dream?" asked Laddie promptly.

"I--ow!--don't know," yawned Russ.

"When you wake up," declared Laddie with conviction.

But Russ did not answer. He had snuggled down into his pillow and was
asleep again.

"Well--anyway," muttered Laddie, "I guess that wasn't a very good riddle
after all."

They got home to Pineville the next day, and as the automobile rolled
into the Bunker yard mother and Norah, the cook, besides Mun Bun and
Margy, were in the doorway. The two little folks at once ran screaming
into the yard.

"There's a strike!" cried out Margy.

"You tan't go to school!" added Mun Bun.

"What do you mean--strike?" asked Russ wonderingly.

"That old thunder struck us. That's enough," said Rose, harking back to
their exciting time in the old house at the seashore.

"Who got struck?" asked Violet. "Did it hurt them--like it did Mun Bun
and me when the tree fell on us?"

"It's a coal strike," said Margy. "And the school can't have any coal."

Neither Rose nor Russ just understood this. What had a coal strike to do
with their going to school?

But they found out all about it after a time. Something quite exciting
had happened in Pineville while they had been down at Grand View. Of
course, it happened in quite a number of other places at the same time;
but only as the coal strike affected their home town did it matter at
all to the six little Bunkers.

Daddy Bunker had plenty of coal in the cellar against the coming of cold
weather when the furnace should be started. But everybody was not as
fortunate--or as wise--as Daddy Bunker.

And in the school bins no coal had been placed early in the season.
Suddenly the delivery of coal in cars to Pineville was stopped. The coal
dealers in the town had no coal to deliver, although they had sold a
great deal of it for delivery.

Frost had come. Indeed, the flowers and plants in the gardens were
already blackened by the touch of Jack Frost's scepter. That meant that
soon it would be so cold that