“The University campus would seem like heaven to me,” Frank Merrill confessed drearily, “and I’d got so the very sight of it nearly drove me insane.”

“The Great White Way for mine,” said Pete Murphy, “at night — all the corset and whisky signs flashing, the streets jammed with benzine-buggies, the sidewalks crowded with boobs, and every lobster palace filled to the roof with chorus girls.”

“Say,” Billy Fairfax burst out suddenly; and for the first time since the shipwreck a voice among them carried a clear business-like note of curiosity.  “You fellows troubled with your eyes?  As sure as shooting, I’m seeing things.  Out in the west there — black spots — any of the rest of you get them?”

One or two of the group glanced cursorily backwards.  A pair of perfunctory “Noes!” greeted Billy’s inquiry.

“Well, I’m daffy then,” Billy decided.  He went on with a sudden abnormal volubility.  “Queer thing about it is I’ve been seeing them the whole morning.  I’ve just got back to that Point where I realized there was something wrong.  I’ve always had a remarkably far sight.”  He rushed on at the same speed; but now he had the air of one who is trying to reconcile puzzling phenomena with natural laws.  “And it seems as if — but there are no birds large enough — wish it would stop, though.  Perhaps you get a different angle of vision down in these parts.  Did any of you ever hear of that Russian peasant who could see the four moons of Jupiter without a glass?  The astronomers tell about him.”

Nobody answered his question.  But it seemed suddenly to bring them back to the normal.

“See here, boys,” Frank Merrill said, an unexpected note of authority in his voice, “we can’t sit here all the morning like this.  We ought to rig up a signal, in case any ship -.  Moreover, we’ve got to get together and save as much as we can.  We’ll be hungry in a little while.  We can’t lie down on that job too long.”

Honey Smith jumped to his feet.  “Well, Lord knows, I want to get busy.  I don’t want to do any more thinking, thank you.  How I ache!  Every muscle in my body is raising particular Hades at this moment.”

The others pulled themselves up, groaned, stretched, eased protesting muscles.  Suddenly Honey Smith pounded Billy Fairfax on the shoulder, “You’re it, Billy,” he said and ran down the beach.  In another instant they were all playing tag.  This changed after five minutes to baseball with a lemon for a ball and a chair-leg for a bat.  A mood of wild exhilaration caught them.  The inevitable psychological reaction had set in.  Their morbid horror of Nature vanished in its vitalizing flood like a cobweb in a flame.  Never had sea or sky or earth seemed more lovely, more lusciously, voluptuously lovely.  The sparkle of the salt wind tingled through their bodies like an electric current.  The warmth in the air lapped them like a hot bath.  Joy-in-life flared up in them to such a height that it kept them running and leaping meaninglessly.  They shouted wild phrases to each other.  They burst into song.  At times they yelled scraps of verse.