"There, there," said the boatswain, "that'll do for the present. Cast off grapnels, please, and save your hugging for some one who likes it better. Hello, you lubbers!"--addressing the sailors,--"get up, here! I'm ashamed of the cloth, I am. Yes, it's Pipe--who else? Want proof of it, do you?" The sailors were sitting upon the ground staring, dumb and incredulous, upon their old officer. "Well, here goes then. You know the sound of pipe to quarters, I'll be bound." So saying he put his whistle to his lips, and sounded the old familiar note. It was enough. The frightened foragers rose and shook hands with Pipe. The scattered runaways came back. An eager crowd surrounded the boatswain to hear him explain this marvelous resurrection from the deep. "Well, it's easily enough explained. Come to think of it now, I don't wonder that you took me for a ghost. In sooth, it is not often that a Brownie stays under water for a whole day, and comes up again, unless, may be, as a ghost." "What! Under water a whole day?" cried Help. "You don't mean that seriously, do you?" "Aye, aye, shipmate, that I do. It has not been half an hour since I left the depths of the lake there. I went down with the rest under the keel of that infernal old pot that the Pixies set afloat. I supposed my time had come at last. But no one seems to be willing to die even when his time has come; so you see, I struck out pretty lively, so as to get clear of the wreck and the drowning crews as I came up, and then allowed myself to rise. First thing I knew I was diving straight through the door of a water pixie's nest! You know there are some of those creatures who make a kind of hollow globe or diving bell under the water." "Yes," said True eagerly, "the Argyroneta pixies." "Aye, those are the fellows. Well, they stay and balance their nest with cables, which they fasten to stems of water plants; then they mount to the surface, catch a bubble of air in the little hairs of their legs and hands, sink with it and shoot it up into the nest. When it is filled they have a water-tight house filled with air, down in the very midst of the lake. It is a cunning thing even if it is made by a Pixie. [Illustration: FIG. 106.--Pipe's Escape from the Water Pixie's Den.]