"Devereux’s story was a nine days’ wonder in San Francisco, confirmed in substance as it was by the recent authentic report from Callao. The newspapers made good copy of it. Many believed him outright; a man doesn’t float about in the Pacific for over a year and emerge from the experience in robust health, without there being some simple and practical explanation. Yet sensational publicity quickly prejudiced the case, as it invariably does. After the first flush of pleasurable excitement, public interest began to put him down either as a hoax or a madman, and then promptly forgot him. One of the papers tried to start a subscription for a schooner, so that he might search for his island, but it met with little response. The return wave of prosaic life rolled over him, left him submerged and helpless. For a while he went about seeking sympathy and assistance, but his melancholy tale soon came to be a nuisance, doors were shut in his face, and men avoided him. "At length he had the good sense to go away. He wandered to the East, moved about from place to place. The story followed him, distorted in the passage of time. And so we meet him here, a man with a strange hallucination—an interesting case, and romantic, but unquestionably mad" *II* Nichols leaned toward me, his eyes kindling. "Let me take you back to the morning after the squall that separated the boats" said he "The sun rose in a clear sky; the quick tropical storm had entirely disappeared. Devereux looked about him, and saw no sign of the others. One hardly realizes, until one has experienced the fact, how easy it is for boats to become separated in the night, especially under severe conditions of weather, or how rapidly a dozen miles may spring up between them. And a dozen might as well be as many hundreds, for all chances of their coming together again. The wind had died to a baffling breeze that seemed to be trying to blow from all directions at once. Devereux had no chronometer—nothing but a pocket watch, a sextant, a compass, and an old general chart of the Pacific. After an hour’s study of his situation, he came to a quick decision. The chart and the pocket watch couldn’t be trusted to get him to the Sandwich Islands; like the second mate, somewhere within a radius of twenty-five miles from him at that moment, he changed the boat’s course and steered due east in search of a continent. "While they were getting up the sail to catch a wandering air that seemed to have settled in the west, a man forward shouted in tones of horror that the water cask was empty. A frantic investigation verified the fact. An oar carelessly thrown down had loosened the plug in the head of the cask, and their precious supply of water was washing around in the bottom of the boat. They tasted it, but found it too salt to drink; the boat, fresh from the top of the forward house, was leaking quite a little.