“I’m hungry!” he decided, opening the pantry door.  “Skating always gives you such an appetite.”

He had heard some one say this.

As in most pantries, the favorite place for the Blossom cake box was on the highest shelf.  Why this was so, puzzled Twaddles, as it has puzzled many other small boys and girls.

“I should think Norah might leave it down low,” he grumbled, dragging a chair into the pantry with some difficulty and proceeding to climb into it.

By stretching, he managed to get his fingers on the cake box lid and pull it down.  He opened it.

The box was perfectly empty.

“Why, the idea!” sputtered the outraged Twaddles, who felt distinctly cheated.  “I wonder if Mother knows we haven’t any cake.  I’d better go and tell her.”

But he didn’t—­not right away.  For there were other boxes on the various shelves, and Twaddles felt it was his duty to peep into these to see what he could find.  He was disappointed in most of them because they held such uninteresting things as rice and barley and coffee, nothing that a starving person could eat with any pleasure.

Then at last he thought he had found something he could eat.  It was in a smooth, round glass jar with a screw lid and was a clear jelly-like substance that looked as though it might be marmalade or honey or some kind of jam.

He opened the jar without trouble and sniffed at the contents.  It smelled very good indeed.  Twaddles plunged in an investigating finger.

The jam stuck to his finger.  Still, Twaddles could not get enough off to taste, and he had liberally covered all the other fingers on that hand before he pulled away from the jar.

“That certainly is funny jam,” he puzzled, trying to scrape his fingers clean with the other hand.

“Twaddles!” called Mother Blossom.  “Oh, Twaddles, where are you?  Aren’t you going to help me toast marshmallows?”

Twaddles backed out of the pantry, into Norah who had come downstairs, freshly gowned, to start her supper.

“Glory be!” she ejaculated.  “Twaddles, what have you been up to now?  If you’ve been messing in my pantry, I’ll tell your mother.  What’s that all over your hands?”

“Jam,” said Twaddles meekly.

Norah eyed him with suspicion.

“There’s no jam there,” she said.  “Come over here to the light where I can see ye.”

Norah took Twaddles’ wrists in her hands gingerly, for he was a very sticky child, and turned his hands over to examine them.

“Jam, is it!” she snorted indignantly.  “You just go and show yourself to your mother.  See what she says about the jam.  I declare, you can’t keep a thing from the young ones in this house!”

Twaddles was glad to escape from the kitchen before Norah should discover the many things out of place in her pantry, and he went into the living-room, carefully holding out his gummy hands before him, to find his mother.