CHAPTER V.
A NAVAL DISASTER.
cork?" cried Ida. "Let me see it."
Brian handed over the small object which he had seen lying in a corner of the empty box. It was an ordinary cork, such as would fit a good-sized medicine bottle.
"That's what we must have heard the other day rolling about when we turned the chest up on its end," said Guy.
"What's the good of it? Throw it away!" cried Elsie, who could not get the bank-notes out of her mind.
"I wonder how it can have got there!" said Guy, as the family prepared to move back into the warmer room. "What could be the good of locking up and sealing a cork in an iron-bound box for twenty years?"
"I don't suppose it was put there on purpose," answered his father. "It dropped in by mistake."