The look the Frogman gave her was a very wise look and he rose from his chair and strutted up and down the room with his hands under his coattails, in a very pompous and imposing manner. This was the first time so difficult a matter had been brought to him and he wanted time to think. It would never do to let them suspect his ignorance and so he thought very, very hard how best to answer the woman without betraying himself.

“I beg to inform you,” said he, “that nothing in the Yip Country has ever been stolen before.”

“We know that, already,” answered Cayke the Cookie Cook, impatiently.

“Therefore,” continued the Frogman, “this theft becomes a very important matter.”

“Well, where is my dishpan?” demanded the woman.

“It is lost; but it must be found. Unfortunately, we have no policemen or detectives to unravel the mystery, so we must employ other means to regain the lost article. Cayke must first write a Proclamation and tack it to the door of her house, and the Proclamation must read that whoever stole the jeweled dishpan must return it at once.”

“But suppose no one returns it,” suggested Cayke.

“Then,” said the Frogman, “that very fact will be proof that no one has stolen it.”

Cayke was not satisfied, but the other Yips seemed to approve the plan highly. They all advised her to do as the Frogman had told her to, so she posted the sign on her door and waited patiently for someone to return the dishpan—which no one ever did.

Again she went, accompanied by a group of her neighbors, to the Frogman, who by this time had given the matter considerable thought. Said he to Cayke:

“I am now convinced that no Yip has taken your dishpan, and, since it is gone from the Yip Country, I suspect that some stranger came from the world down below us, in the darkness of night when all of us were asleep, and took away your treasure. There can be no other explanation of its disappearance. So, if you wish to recover that golden, diamond-studded dishpan, you must go into the lower world after it.”

This was indeed a startling proposition. Cayke and her friends went to the edge of the flat tableland and looked down the steep hillside to the plains below. It was so far to the bottom of the hill that nothing there could be seen very distinctly and it seemed to the Yips very venturesome, if not dangerous, to go so far from home into an unknown land.

However, Cayke wanted her dishpan very badly, so she turned to her friends and asked:

“Who will go with me?”

No one answered this question, but after a period of silence one of the Yips said: