Page:Ballinger Price--Us and the Bottle Man.djvu/76

Rh than waiting for the next number of a serial story, because you're pretty certain when that will come, but we had no idea how long it would be before the Bottle Man wrote to us.

Aunt Ailsa still needed cheering up a good deal, and that kept us busy. The cheering was great fun for us, because it consisted mostly of picnics and long, long walks,—the kind where you take a stick and a kit-bag and eat your lunch under a hedge, like a tinker. We also wrote a story which we used to put in instalments under her plate at breakfast every other day. We took turns writing the story, and Greg's instalments always made Aunt Ailsa the most cheered up of all. The story was much too long to put in here, and rather ridiculous, besides.

By this time it was almost September, and asters were beginning to bloom in the garden and the hollyhocks were almost 62