The Columbia Network takes pleasure in presenting Orson Wells and the Mercury Theater on the air.

In the second of a unique new summer series of nine dramatic productions, the first time in its history that radio has brought to the country an entire theatrical institution.

Columbia is proud to welcome Orson Wells to its roster of stars and to give him the opportunity of bringing to the air those same qualities of vitality and imagination that have made him the most talk of theatrical director in America today.

Good evening. This is Orson Wells speaking. If there's anything bloodthirsty or than a werewolf, it's a pirate. The Mercury Theater is playing safe.

Now its vampires and their ill-cleve viewers uncannily cold as old Dracula himself will stake down firmly and it is to be hoped permanently in his own family plot last week then.

There are figures to prove that you are susceptible to buried treasure. We calculate that no decent law abiding citizen is immune to pirates. There are cowboys and Indians, there are gangsters and g-men that these delights are inconstant like the short skirt. I don't care how young you are. Nothing charms, nothing ingratiates, nothing wins like a one-legged double-barrel buccaneer with ear rings, a hankerchief on his head and a knife in his teeth. What could be more appropriate on the starboard rail of your formatted brigantine?

You haven't a formatted brigantine, you have treasure island in your library because it's a great English classic and this evening because it's a great story. It's on your radio. That's what I mean by playing safe.

Once there was a small boy who asked his stepfather who had written the number of books, please to write something interesting.

The stepfather seeing his point immediately contributed to serial to something repugnant called young folks, a periodical circulated among that section of the English nation known as Tiny Tots, who were very prevalent in the 80s.

The name of the serial was the sea cook by Captain George North and if the Tiny Tots didn't think it was interesting they should have been boiled in oil.

The story was begun the stepfather says on a chill September morning by the cheek of a brisk fire and the rain drumming on the window.

The small boy himself helped a lot even though Captain North got the credit and so did a third and equally incurable small boy, the author's father.

They drew a map with the chart of an island showing very queer and wonderful attractions, spyglass shoulder for instance and skeleton island and the North cash with a bar silver and then on that chill September morning by that brisk fire of theirs.

The three potters varied their plunder, their bloons and Louis doer gold and silver and rich jewels and pieces of eight.

That's why the story was finally called Treasure Island.

It's foolish to guess who's tuned in on this broadcast but if in some way we were retelling the story hope to vaultly that he who the Samoans laid to rest in the hills of their own far away Treasure Island and who is still known out there only as the great teller of tales.

Would not wish tonight as he did so unaccountably at first to suppress the real name of Captain George North.

The small boy of course should have been decorated it's a better world because he asked for something interesting but then he was lucky there are millions and millions of small boys but only one of us had Robert Louis Stevenson for a stepfather.

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson with Orson Wells as long John Silver and as Jim Hawkins who tells the story Treasure Island.

This is the end of the story.

Squire Trilone Dr. Livzi and the rest of the gentleman having asked me to write down the whole particulars of our Treasure Island from the beginning to the end keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island and that only because there is treasure not yet lifted.

I take up my pen in the year of grade 1783 and go back to that time 19 years ago when my father kept the Admiral Ben Bowen and the brown old seamen with a saber cut first took up his lodging under our roof.

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