g is more important
than cooking anyway."

It was pleasant sitting about on this new and original desert island
which combined all the attractions of wild life with substantial
safety. Only its overlapping edges could wash away and as these melted
and disappeared the island gradually assumed a square and orderly
conformation; its bleak and lonely coast formed a tidy square and
looked like some truant back yard off on a holiday. What it lost in
rugged grandeur it made up in modern neatness and seemed indeed a
desert Island with all improvements.

Nestling within its stalwart and water-tight timbers it presented a
scene of varied beauty. Grasshoppers disported gayly upon its rugged
surface, occasionally leaping inadvertently into the surrounding surf
and kicking their ungainly legs in the sparkling water.

A pair of adventurous robins that had refused to desert the fugitive
peninsula were chirping in the little blossom-laden tree and one of
them came down and perched upon the traffic sign to prune his feathers
before retiring. Savage beetles roamed wild over the isle, and wild
angleworms, disturbed by the late upheaval, squirmed about in quest of
new homes.

The vegetation on the island appeared in gay profusion, reminding one
of the Utopian scenes of fragrant beauty which delighted the eyes of
the bold explorers who first landed on the shores of Florida.

Yellow dandelions dotted the greensward, purple violets peeped up
through the overgrown grass, and a rusty tin can, memento of some
prehistoric fisherman perhaps, lay near the shore. Not even the
geometrical perfection of the island detracted from its primitive and
rugged beauty.

True, it had no bays or wooded coves where pirates might have lurked,
and it was fickle to any one spot. But wheresoever its wanton fancy
took it the dying sunlight flickered down through the little tree and
glazed the spotless blossoms so full of promise that clustered above
the little band of hardy adventurers.

Before they had finished their repast--a repast as strange and
surprising as the island itself--they had drifted half a mile upstream
with the incoming tide. Here the sturdy underpinning of the desert
isle caught upon a tiny reef and the island swung slowly around like a
sleepy carrousel and rested from its travels.

CHAPTER XVI

BEFORE THE PARTY

Meanwhile we must return to the mother country, to take note of important
happenings there. While our doughty