use it must have hurt like
anything, even then, and I could see his jaw set hard. Jerry and I
gathered up the kit-bag and the jersey and what was left of the
skirt and followed along. Just beside the dinghy our man paused and
looked all around at the ugly blackness of the Sea Monster and up to
the jaggedy top of it. Then he looked down at Greg and smiled a
little sorry smile, and said very slowly and gently:

"Ye be Three Poore Mariners."

Jerry and I stared at each other, and I said:

"You must know that song, too. We used to pretend being marooned,
but we never thought it would really happen."

Then Jerry said suddenly:

"By the way, what's your name, sir?"

"You'll have to row, Jerry," said our man, "because I must keep the
wounded just the way he is." Then he said:

"Some people call me Andrew, but my intimate friends call me 'The
Bottle Man'."

CHAPTER XI

I thought that perhaps it might be a dream after all, because that's
the way things happen in dreams, and that I would wake up and find
it still night and the rain splashing down and poor Greg crying. But
the dinghy was real and so were the slippy slidy wet rocks, and I
had to watch what I was about and not go staring in astonishment at
our man. We all had to be careful about the rocks, and that's why
none of us said anything till we were in the dinghy, except for one
gasp of astonishment.

"But how _could_ you be?" Jerry and I asked together when we all
were safely aboard, with our man in the stern holding Greg
carefully.

"But how did you get un-oldened?" Greg asked.

"We thought you were a very old gentleman," I explained giddily.

"_I am_," said the Bottle Man. "Ancient."

"But what about your gray hairs?" Jerry demanded, tugging away at
the oars.

"If you've more than one gray hair you've gray hairs," said our man.
"I have eleven."

He ducked down his nice, dark, rumpled-up head for us to look, but I
must say I couldn't see more than one little one all buried among
the black.

"You're grown up, but you're not old at all," I said. "We've been
imagining you as an aged old man with a long white beard."

"I never mentioned a long white beard," the Bottle Man said.

"Yes; but what about your tottering along on two sticks?" Jerry said
suddenly.

But we had come alongside the catboat, and no one could talk for a
little while until we were all arranged in the boat and our man had
told Jerry and me to pull a mattressy thing out of