The appearance of the island when I came on deck next morning was
altogether changed. Although the breeze had now utterly failed, we had
made a great deal of way during the night, and were now lying becalmed
about half a mile to the southeast of the low eastern coast.
Gray-colored woods covered a large part of the surface. This even tint
was indeed broken up by streaks of yellow sandbreak in the lower lands,
and by many tall trees of the pine family, out-topping the others--some
singly, some in clumps; but the general coloring was uniform and sad.
The hills ran up . . .


Pee-wee blinked his eyes, yawned, then suddenly drew himself up into an
erect sitting posture and pushed the book from him. "Gee whiz," he
mused, "that's what I'd like, to go off to a desert island. They don't
have any desert islands now; that's one thing I don't like about this
century. Hikes and camping and all that make me tired; I'd like to be
on a desert island, that's what _I'd_ like to do. I'd like to be
marooned. Gee whiz, we only kid ourselves trying to make ourselves
think we're doing things that are wild. I guess all the desert islands
are discovered by now; oh boy, there were lots and lots of them in the
seventeenth century; that's my favorite century, the seventeenth, on
account of buried treasure and desert islands."

Indulging these disconsolate spring musings, Pee-wee sank down in his
chair again, a frowning, dreamy figure, and floated out of the library
and away from all the sordid environments of Bridgeboro toward a desert
island situated in the south-eastern part of the seventeenth century.
It was a long, long way off and he had to cross the eighteenth and