Oh boy, that was some invention. I’m glad Edison never saw it or he’d have died from jealousy. It was a long, thin bottle, maybe about ten inches long; Dub Smedley said a tooth-brush came in it. There were a lot of crinkly strips of confetti all different colors fixed to the cork; the ends of the strips were bound together and fixed to the cork with a pin. It was kind of like a comet only smaller. It was quite a little smaller. The way you did was to stick the cork in the bottle and hold on to the bottle and let the confetti all fly loose. Then, you could tell what way the wind was blowing. You moved it around in your fingers like a compass till the confetti blew straight out and then you knew that the closed up end of the bottle was pointed the way the wind _wasn’t_ blowing. And the other end was pointing the way the wind _was_ blowing. When you wanted to put that wonderful instrument in your pocket you just stuffed the confetti into the bottle and put the cork in that way. There were three or four matches in the bottle and a lightning bug in case the matches wouldn’t work. There was a cricket too and there was a hole in the cork so the wild animals could breathe. “What’s the cricket for?” I asked the kid. “Will you let go my leg?” he shouted. “Do you think I’m a mooring buoy or something?” “What’s the cricket for?” I asked him. All the while Dub Smedley was laughing. “That shows how much you don’t know about scouting,” Pee-wee said, good and excited. “That’s named the _Chipmunk Scout Emergency Kit_, and maybe I’m going to get it patented. It’s a combination windmeter and you can drink out of the tube if you’re famishing and you can use it for a compass too, because if you lay a cricket on the ground he’ll always start going south----” “Starting for Florida, I guess,” said Dub. “It’s wonderful,” I said. “It’s the most wonderful invention since Luther Burbank invented the shoe-tree.” All of a sudden Dub said, “That would be a good idea for a crazy hike; we could go whichever way the wind blows.” “If we do, I’m the one that invented it,” Pee-wee shouted. He meant the hike. You know he’s the one that invented the Boy Scouts of America. I wouldn’t just exactly say he invented the earth, but just the same, he made some wonderful improvements on it. I said, “That’s a very fine crazy idea; we can hike to the four points of the compass.” “You mean six points,” Dub said; “north, east, south, west, and hither and thither.” So then I began to see that he’d be a good one to go on one of my crazy hikes. I said, “How about yonder? We might go there, too. As long as we have a windmeter we can go everywhere.” “Oh, we can go more places than that,” Dub said. I said, “Sure, only one thing, I hope the windmeter reverses so we can come home again.” I said, “Has it got a reverse gear, kid?”