hipwrecked 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."

Jerry pounced again,--I was laughing too hard to,--and said:

"It's not olives, silly; it's an abbreviated French way of saying
how old we are."

Then I had to pounce on _him_, and tell him it was Latin, as he
might know by the diphthong. By that time Greg had written "Gregory
Holford, Ate 8," across