“Oh, Father! Oh, Father!” cried Lesley, half-laughing and half-crying. “Don’t take everything away from poor Jim; do leave him something!”
“Nonsense, you silly child!” called her mother from the foot of the ladder; but her father said, dryly, “I suppose you don’t think it necessary to leave him the thimble and the necklace, do you?”
“No, oh, no,” whimpered Lesley. “I know that would be silly, but he will be disappointed to find them gone when he comes to look at his collection.”
“I’m ’fraid he will, poor old Jim,” sighed Ronnie, shaking his head.
“Oh, come down the ladder!” called Mother, impatiently. “I’m tired of holding it. If you don’t want to hurt Jim Crow’s feelings, make him another chain, but bring down my thimble, anyway.”
Mother’s suggestion was received with enthusiasm. The party descended to earth, but the ladder was left in place while stout thread and large needles were demanded. Lesley and Ronald sought their stores in Humpty Dumpty Land, and in the course of an hour put together a necklace which would have shamed all the jewels of the Princess Badroulboudour in the “Arabian Nights.”
Malcolm McLean, laughing at the pranks of his astonishing children, climbed the ladder and placed the ornament in Jim Crow’s hidy-hole and when next that honest bird went to examine his treasures, he is reported to have exclaimed, “My stars and garters! What do you think of that? Now that’s what I call a necklace!”
CHAPTER V
A PICNIC WITH STUMPY
It was but a short time after the adventure with that highway and byway robber, Master Crow, when it came time for Stumpy’s annual vacation, and he puffed gloriously away in the Lighthouse tender for his week in San Francisco. As his place was taken meantime by a dull seafaring gentleman having two legs, but no acquaintance with the art of story-telling, the children greatly missed their old friend and were wild with joy when, the day after his return, he begged their father to let them come down to the shore for a picnic.
It was Saturday; of course there were no lessons, of course there were fresh doughnuts, fresh bread, and goats’ milk cheese, so was not a picnic the simplest thing in the world? There was every probability, too, that Stumpy might make chowder in a kettle on the rocks and, oh, why did children have to be scrubbed and brushed within an inch of their lives when the sun shone and the waves called to the picnic?