let. "All riddles have
answers."

"Well, I'll tell you this one, and you can see if it has," went on
Laddie. "Now listen, everybody."

Then he slowly said:

"How is it that a red cow can eat green grass and give white milk that
makes yellow butter?"

No one answered for a moment, and then Daddy Bunker laughed.

"That is pretty good," he said, "and I don't believe there is any answer
to it. Of course we all know a red cow, or one that is a sort of
brownish red, does eat green grass. And the milk a cow gives is white
and the butter made from the white milk is yellow. Of course that isn't
exactly a riddle, but it's pretty good, Laddie."

"And is there an answer to it?" the little boy asked.

"I don't believe there is," answered his father. "It's just one of those
things that happen. Did you make that up, Laddie?"

"No. Cousin Tom told it to me out of a book. But I like it."

Vi still sorrowed for her doll, and, in the days that followed, she
often walked along the beach hoping "Sarah Janet," as she called her,
might be cast up by the tide or the waves. Russ looked also, as did the
others, but no doll was found. Nor did Rose find her gold locket, though
many holes were dug in the sand searching for it.

One morning, after breakfast, when he had gone down on the beach to
watch the fishing boats come in, which he often did, Russ came running
back to the house, very much excited.

"What's the matter?" asked his mother. "Did one of the boats upset and
spill out the fishermen?"

"No'm, Mother. But a box washed up on shore, and it's nailed shut, and
it's heavy, and maybe Vi's doll is in it! Oh, please come down and see
the box on the beach!"

CHAPTER XVI

CAUGHT BY THE TIDE

Ever since they had come to Cousin Tom's, at Seaview, the six little
Bunkers had hoped to find some treasure-trove on the beach. That is,
Russ and Rose and Vi and Laddie did. Margy and Mun Bun were almost too
little to understand what the others meant by "treasure," but they liked
to go along the sand looking for things.

At first, when the children came to the shore, they had hoped to dig up
gold, as Sammie Brown had said his father had when shipwrecked. But a
week or so of making holes in the sand, and finding nothing more than
pretty shells or pebbles, had about cured the older children of hoping
to find a fortune.

"Instead of finding any gold we lost some," said Rose, as she thought of
her pretty locket, which, she feared,