For the bottle was broken into several pieces, and standing up on the board on which it had been set, was a solid, clear piece of ice, just the shape of the glass bottle itself.
"Oh, somebody broke our bottle!" cried Mab. "Now we can't hear the secret!"
CHAPTER III
THE NEW SKATES
Daddy Blake laughed when Mab said that.
"Yes, the bottle is broken," he said, "but it was the ice that broke it."
"How could it?" Hal wanted to know.
"I told you last night," said Daddy Blake, when the children were at breakfast table a little later, "that heat made things get larger, and that cold made them get smaller. That was true, but sometimes, as you see now, freezing cold makes water get larger. That is when it is cold enough to make ice.
"As long as there was only water in the bottle it was all right, the glass was not broken. But in the night it got colder and colder. All the warmth was drawn off into the cold air. Then the water froze, and swelled up. The ice tried to push the cork out of the bottle, just as you would try to push up the lid of a box if you were shut up inside one."
"I guess the wires over the cork wouldn't let the ice push it out," spoke Hal.