Meg and Bobby skated back to them now and then to see that they were all right, and Bobby took off his skates once to try the slide while Twaddles tried to use the skates. They were too large for him, and a fall on the ice dulled his interest. He decided he would rather slide. "They're going to have a big bonfire to-night," reported Bobby, on one of his trips back to the twins. "Things to eat--oh, everything! I wish Mother would let us stay up to skate." "She won't, though," said Twaddles absently. He was busy with a sled Marion Green had loaned him. Marion had tired of playing with her sled, and Twaddles had exhausted all the thrill of sliding down his slide on his feet. He wanted to play toboggan-riding, and when Marion offered him her sled he accepted gratefully. "You'd better not try that," said Bobby seriously, watching Twaddles carefully drag the sled into the position he wanted. "Look out, Twaddles--you're foolish. How are you going to stop it when you get down on the ice?" Twaddles, seated on the sled, looked down the glistening slide to the clear ice below the bank. "With my foot, of course," he said carelessly. "It's just as easy. You watch." Bobby watched, and so did Meg. So did a dozen of the children who had been playing on the slide. They saw Twaddles start himself with a little forward push, skim down the slide like a bird, take the jump at the end of the bank, and shoot out into the pond among the skaters. "I knew he'd make a mess of it," groaned Bobby. Twaddles apparently had forgotten all about using his foot. His sled swept across the ice, crashed into a skater, and Twaddles was sent flying in the opposite direction. The sled brought up against a tree on the other side of the pond, but Twaddles continued to skim over the pond directly toward a patch of thin ice. His cry, as he broke through, was heard by every one on the pond. "He'll be drowned!" wailed Meg. "Oh, Bobby, hurry!" "He can't drown in that water. It isn't deep," said a man, skating past them and stopping to, reassure Meg. "Come on, youngster, you and I can get him out." Bobby put his hand into that of the stranger and was pulled along rapidly toward the spot where the howling Twaddles stood in icy water up to his knees. CHAPTER IX A NEW KIND OF JAM As the man said, there was no danger that Twaddles would be drowned. Cold and wet and miserable, he certainly was, but the stranger rescued him easily, stretching out a long, thin arm across the ice and lifting the boy bodily out of the water, over the thin ice, and on to thick, firm foothold. "There, there, you're just as good as ever," he assured the shivering Twaddles. "You want to run home as fast as you can go and get into dry shoes and stockings, and then you won't ever know you fell into the pond. Scoot, now!" But Twaddles delayed. "Is it--is it--four o'clock?" he asked, his teeth chattering. "Mother said we could stay out till four o'clock."