s. Professor Knapendyke is experimenting with a shrub he has
discovered here. He says it may be a fairly good substitute if properly
cured. But it won't be tobacco, so I guess we may as well make up our
minds to swear off smoking as well as drinking. I hope there's nothing
in the saying that the good die young. Because if there is, we're in for
an epidemic that will wipe out four-fifths of our population in no time
at all. We're going to be so good we'll die like flies."

The weeks wore on and the fields of grain were harvested. The yield was
not a heavy one, but it was sufficient to justify the rather hap-hazard
experiments. The fifty-odd acres of wheat produced a little over a
thousand bushels. The twenty-acre oat-field had averaged forty bushels.
A few acres of barley, sown broadcast in the calcareous loam along the
coast, amounted to nothing.

Primitive means for grinding the grain had been devised. This first
crop was being laboriously crushed between roughly made mill-stones, but
before another harvest came along, a mill would be in operation on the
banks of Leap Frog River.

The exploration of the island had long since been completed. In certain
parts of the dense forest covering the western section there were
magnificent specimens of the Norfolk Island pine. Fruits of the citrous
family were found in abundance; wild cherries, wild grapes, figs, and an
apple of amazing proportions and exceeding sweetness. Pigeons in great
numbers were found, a fact that puzzled Professor Knapendyke not a
little.

He finally arrived at an astonishing conclusion. He connected the
presence of these birds with the remark-able exodus of wild pigeons from
their haunts in the United States in the eighties. Millions of pigeons
at that time took their annual flight southward from Michigan, Indiana
and other states in that region, and were never seen again. What became
of this prodigious cloud of birds still remains a mystery. Knapendyke
now advanced the theory that in skirting the Gulf of Mexico on their way
to the winter roosts in Central America they were caught by a hurricane
and blown out to sea. By various stages the bewildered survivors of the
gale made their way down the east coast of South America, only to
be caught up again by another storm that carried them out into the
Atlantic. A few reached this island, hundreds of miles from the
mainland, and here they remained to propagate. At any rate, the
naturalist was preparing to p