The back cover, below, is a facsimilie of a forgery of an authentic treasure map which I drew up on yellowed shelf paper when I was ten and my sister Valerie was six, which I distressed with water and fire, then rolled up and placed in a corked bottle at the foot of the stairs back home at Edgewood Place, where I was pretty sure, and quite right, that Valerie was going to find it.

The short of it is that Valerie fell for the trick and saved the map all through the winter until we drove up north in July. Following the instructions to arrive by cannoe at the beach where the treasure was burried, she rushed right by the supposed burrial spot so that, before she rearrived with a shovel in the canoe, I was able to make a hole where x marks the spot, it make it seem to her that pirates had arrived just before she did. She did not realize the truth of this until she was age fourty six. This issue of the Loon Star took the whole issue to tell this very short story, so here below, we will print a perhaps related item from another issue.