certain brick were removed the whole edifice would fall in ruins.
Pee-wee was not even an amateur engineer. That world-stirring
consequences could flow from an act so casual and trivial as securing a
fishing rod never entered his innocent and pre-occupied mind. He did
not know that in the hasty calculations of Townsend all the component
parts of this system of props and fetters were necessary one to
another. He removed the brick and the cathedral fell and there
followed a catastrophe compared to which the World War is a mere
incident. If he had pulled the north pole out of the earth the sequel
could hardly have been more momentous.

Sublimely innocent of the fact that he was unhinging the universe,
Pee-wee arose, advanced to the outer pole and began tugging on it. It
did not come up easily for the force of the rapidly ebbing tide caused
the island to press against it like a brake. But he succeeded at last
and as he dragged the muddy pole across the grass, the island turned
slowly cornerwise to the shore.

In his preoccupation, Pee-wee did not notice this. He tied his
fishline to the end of the pole, bent another pin and provisioned it
with a stuffed olive, requisitioned from a cutglass dish nearby. How
he intended to support this lengthy pole so that its end might reach
the neighborhood of the coy eels is not a part of this narrative for
Pee-wee's angling enterprise never reached that point.

He was presently startled by a splash and looking around he saw that
the end of the scaffold had slipped off the island. He was now aroused
to the imminent peril of the Isle of Desserts and to the terrible
responsibility which fell to the clothesline and the bushes.