MR. CRUSOE SAVES ME FROM A FLOGGING.page 3..

A NEW ROBINSON CRUSOE

By W. L. ALDEN

AUTHOR OF

“THE CRUISE OF THE CANOE CLUB” “THE CRUISE OF THE ‘GHOST’”

“THE ADVENTURES OF JIMMY BROWN” ETC.

Illustrated

NEW YORK

HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE

1888

HARPER’S YOUNG PEOPLE SERIES.

Illustrated. 16mo, Cloth, $1 00 per volume.

THE ADVENTURES OF JIMMY BROWN. Edited by W. L. Alden.

THE CRUISE OF THE CANOE CLUB. By W. L. Alden.

THE CRUISE OF THE “GHOST.” By W. L. Alden.

THE MORAL PIRATES. By W. L. Alden.

A NEW ROBINSON CRUSOE. By W. L. Alden.

TOBY TYLER; OR, TEN WEEKS WITH A CIRCUS. By James Otis.

MR. STUBBS’S BROTHER. A Sequel to “Toby Tyler.” By James Otis.

TIM AND TIP; OR, THE ADVENTURES OF A BOY AND A DOG. By James Otis.

LEFT BEHIND; OR, TEN DAYS A NEWSBOY. By James Otis.

RAISING THE “PEARL.” By James Otis.

SILENT PETE; OR, THE STOWAWAYS. By James Otis.

THE COLONEL’S MONEY. By Lucy C. Lillie.

MILDRED’S BARGAIN, AND OTHER STORIES. By Lucy C. Lillie.

NAN. By Lucy C. Lillie.

MUSIC AND MUSICIANS. By Lucy C. Lillie.

ROLF HOUSE. By Lucy C. Lillie.

JO’S OPPORTUNITY. By Lucy C. Lillie.

THE FOUR MACNICOLS. By William Black.

THE LOST CITY; OR, THE BOY EXPLORERS IN CENTRAL ASIA. By David Ker.

INTO UNKNOWN SEAS; OR, THE CRUISE OF TWO SAILOR-BOYS. By David Ker.

THE TALKING LEAVES. An Indian Story. By W. O. Stoddard.

TWO ARROWS. A Story of Red and White. By W. O. Stoddard.

WHO WAS PAUL GRAYSON? By John Habberton, Author of “Helen’s Babies.”

PRINCE LAZYBONES, AND OTHER STORIES. By Mrs. W. J. Hays.

THE ICE QUEEN. By Ernest Ingersoll.

STRANGE STORIES FROM HISTORY. By George Cary Eggleston.

WAKULLA: A Story of Adventure in Florida. By Kirk Munroe.

THE FLAMINGO FEATHER. By Kirk Munroe.

DERRICK STERLING. By Kirk Munroe.

Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York.

☞ Any of the above works will be sent by mail, postage prepaid,

to any part of the United States or Canada, on receipt of the price.

Copyright, 1888, by Harper & Brothers.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

A NEW ROBINSON CRUSOE.

CHAPTER I.

I did not exactly write this story, for I can’t write very much except my name, but I talked it all, from beginning to end, to a man who writes just as plain as print, and he wrote it down just as I told it to him. At least he said he would, and I am pretty sure he kept his word; but if he did happen to put any mistakes into it, you will know they are his, and not mine.

My name is Mike Flanagan—my father was Michael Flanagan, and my uncle was Patrick Flanagan—and I was born in Ireland, in the city of Cork. We all came to America when I was a baby, and after everybody that belonged to me died I went to sea. I never saw my uncle Patrick, but I always thought a great deal of him because I was told he was a pirate, and that, of course, made the family very proud; but I found out after I grew up that he was only a pilot in Queenstown harbor, which is very different from being a pirate.

When I went to sea I was fourteen years old, and I made seven voyages between New York and ports in England, France, and Germany. I liked the Atlantic well enough, but I wanted to make a voyage in a deep-water ship, so I shipped on board the H. G. Thompson, a big American ship that was bound from New York to San Francisco, and then to China. I was sixteen years old then, and though I shipped as ordinary seaman, I expected that after the ship got back to New York I would be able to ship as A. B.

There were twenty-two of us in the forecastle—ten A. B.’s, ten ordinary seamen, and two boys. The captain and the second mate were very decent, but the mate was a hard man, and as I was in his watch, I didn’t have a very good time. He was a Nova Scotia chap, and he was a mean, bullying fellow. He was no sailor-man either, and I don’t see how he ever got to be mate of a ship.

We had one passenger. He was a man about thirty years old, and he was making the voyage for his health because he wasn’t very well. He was thin and tall, with the brightest eyes you ever saw, and he had a servant with him to take care of him who was the laziest and most worthless chap I ever saw aboard a ship. None of us knew exactly what was the matter with the passenger, except that he didn’t seem to be very strong. At least we all thought he wasn’t, until one day when the mate happened to be laying into me with a rope’s end—which he had a way of doing—the passenger jumped up and snatched the rope away, and told the mate that if he touched me again he’d heave him overboard. The mate was twice the passenger’s weight, but instead of killing him on the spot, as I expected of course he would do, he was actually frightened, and walked away without saying a word.

That was the beginning of my acquaintance with the queer passenger. After that he often used to talk to me when we happened to be on deck together, and was as kind to me as he could be. He told me his name was James Robinson Crusoe, and that his grandfather was a very celebrated man, who lived for twenty-eight years on an island all by himself, having been cast away. The passenger was forever talking about his grandfather, whose name was Robinson Crusoe, without the James; but I never could see that the old man amounted to very much, though I never read the book of travels that he wrote, and perhaps the passenger did not always tell the truth about him.

I got to like Mr. Crusoe very much, though he afterwards gave me more trouble than any sailor-man ever before got into through being kind to a passenger, and being willing to talk to him. However, he meant to do right, and I shall never forget how he stood up for me when the mate was arguing with me, though of course, being a passenger, he had no right to be interfering between the officers and the men.

We sailed from New York on the first day of November, and we had very decent weather all the way to the Horn, and around it, for that matter. We all thought we were going to make about a ninety-day passage to San Francisco, when our luck turned, and we got a strong northerly wind that lasted till the captain got out of patience, and put the ship to the westward in hopes of meeting a fair wind. We must have run a long ways out of our course, but the wind still hung in the north, until one day a tremendous hurricane struck us all of a sudden from the eastward. It was about noon, and all hands were at dinner, and the captain and mate had gone below to work up their observations, when the second mate sung out for all hands to shorten sail. We were on the starboard tack, carrying all three top-gallant sails. We got the top-gallant sails rolled up, the main-sail, the outer jib, spanker, and maintop-gallant stay-sail stowed, and were furling the fore and mizzen upper top-sails, when the gale struck us. The captain was on deck long before this time, and as it was blowing too hard to bring the ship up to the wind with the sail she had on her, he squared the yards and put her right before it.

We had the worst job I ever saw to get the sail off her. By the time we had the upper top-sails furled and the fore and aft sails stowed we had to reef the fore-sail, the fore and main lower top-sails, and to furl the mizzen-top sail. All hands were on the foreyard for at least an hour before we could get the sail reefed, and half a dozen times I thought we should have to give it up. However, we got it reefed and set at last, and when we were just through with it the sail split and blew away.

By this time it was blowing harder than I ever saw it blow before, and the ship was taking in green seas on each side over the rail every time she rolled. The captain knew we had no time to lose, for the ship was continually burying herself nearly up to the foremast, she still had so much sail on her; so he ordered the fore and mizzen lower top-sails to be brailed up, and let them blow away, while we close-reefed the lower maintop-sail, which we did without very much difficulty, and then knocked off to get our suppers.

The forecastle was all afloat with the water that had come down the hatchway before any one had thought to close it, so we had our supper on the quarter-deck, where all the people except the cook and Mr. Crusoe were gathered. Mr. Crusoe had got a fall, so I heard his servant say, and his left leg was a little sprung, so that he didn’t care to come on deck, but stayed below in his berth.

The wind kept on freshening and the sea kept on getting up, and by the time we were through with our supper we had to take the top-sail off her, and bring her down to bare poles. Even then she travelled faster than she had ever done before in her life, and she must have been making a good fifteen knots an hour. Nobody could go forward, for the waist of her was mostly full of water, so all hands stayed on the quarter-deck, and waited for the hurricane to blow itself out.

It didn’t show the least sign of blowing itself out, and if it had known how to blow harder it would have done it. It blew for three days and nights, gradually backing to the northward and westward, until on the last night the ship was heading nearly south-east. Of course we sailors liked it, all except the fact that it was impossible to do any cooking. All we had to do was to take our tricks at the wheel, and then to sit around the mizzen-mast and wonder if it meant to blow forever. We didn’t keep any lookout, for nobody could get forward, and the air was so black with flying spoondrift that you couldn’t see much more than the length of the ship. Of course the mate growled at us a good deal, but even he couldn’t think of any work that we could do, so we didn’t mind him.

It was about the middle of the last night of the hurricane that the ship struck. Without giving us the least warning she struck a reef, and the fore and main-mast and the mizzen-top mast went overboard together. At the same moment a sea boarded us over the stern, and swept the captain, the second mate, and five or six of the men away with it. The rest of us took to the mizzen rigging, and expected every moment that the ship would go to pieces.

She held together, however, though she pounded heavily and the seas broke over her constantly. There was only one boat left that had not been stove to pieces or swept away, and that was on the top of the deck-house. The mate and the rest of us watched our chances, and got safely where the boat was and launched her. We were just going to cast off when I remembered the passenger, and climbed on board the wreck again to look for him. The men shouted to me to come back, but the mate sang out that there was no room for passengers, and shoved the boat off. I saw a big sea lift her and carry her on out of sight, and then I went below to find Mr. Crusoe.

I found him crawling up the companion-way, and nearly drowned by the water which every minute or two rushed down on him. I got him on deck, and made a rope fast around his waist, and then around mine, and after a while I got him into the rigging, where we were out of the reach of the sea.

We had hardly got into the rigging when the ship slid over the reef into smoother water, and drifted away before the wind. The sea did not break over us any more, but we stayed in the rigging, for I expected that we would sink in a few minutes, and there was a chance that she might sink where the water would be shallow. She swung around and drifted stern foremost, and I could see by the way she rolled that there was a great deal of water in her, although her deck was still a good six feet above the water. Before she had drifted very long her stern grounded quite gently, and remained high and dry, although the forward part of her, as far as the stump of the foremast, was under water.

Of course we did not stay in the rigging any longer, but came down and made ourselves comfortable on the quarter-deck. I got the hand-lead and sounded the water. I found that we were on a sandy bottom, and that it shelved so gently that there was no danger that the ship would slide off and sink in deep water. The wind still blew hard, but the reef protected us from the sea, and there was no danger that the ship would break up unless the wind changed. I went into the cabin, which was quite free from water, and brought up a couple of mattresses and some blankets, and told Mr. Crusoe that we would turn in and sleep on deck till morning.

He had not said very much since I brought him on deck, except to ask where the rest of the people were. I told him that the mate might not have meant to desert us, but that he cast loose so as to prevent the boat from being stove against the side of the ship; but Mr. Crusoe said that, whether the mate deserted us wilfully or not, I would have been in the boat if I had not gone back to try to save a passenger. He put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “Mike, you have done a generous and noble action, and I shall never forget it as long as I live.” But I told him that we had better go to sleep while we had the chance, and that we could find out in the morning whether we were going to live or be drowned.

You see, if we were stranded on a sand-bank in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, our chances would not be worth much; but if we were on an island, we would be able to get ashore and make ourselves comfortable. Since we could not possibly tell where we were until daylight, there was no use in bothering ourselves about it.

Of course I didn’t like it when the boat left me on the wreck, for I thought I had lost my chance of saving my life; but the more I thought of it, the more I was sure that the boat could not have lived five minutes in the breakers, and that every one in her must have been drowned. I felt pretty certain that the ship must be near the shore, for you don’t often find sand-banks out at sea, and I made no doubt that Mr. Crusoe and I could go ashore in the morning. At any rate, we were safe enough for that night, and could be sure of a good breakfast out of the cabin stores in the morning. I don’t believe in looking too far ahead, and a good night’s sleep, with no turning out to come on deck in the middle of the night, and with a good breakfast waiting for you, and nobody to set you at work, is a good enough prospect for me. So I rolled myself up in my blanket, with a good soft mattress under me, and a real feather pillow under my head, and was asleep inside of five minutes.

CHAPTER II.

I woke up about five o’clock the next morning. It was a beautiful day. The wind had all died down, and the sea where the wreck was lying was as smooth as New York Bay. We were stranded close to the shore of a lovely island, and in the opposite direction I could see the surf breaking on a reef that seemed to surround the island about a mile from the shore, everywhere except towards the south, where there was an opening about half a mile broad. The island seemed to be covered with trees that grew close down to the shore, and at the northerly end there was a high hill that was shaped like a sugar-loaf. I could not see any signs that the island was inhabited, and the wreck lay so close to the beach that I could have swum ashore without the least trouble.

I let Mr. Crusoe sleep while I split some dry wood from the door of the captain’s room and started a fire in the galley. I found coffee, and pilot-bread, and a lot of cold roast lamb in the steward’s pantry, and when I woke up Mr. Crusoe, I told him that the best breakfast he ever heard of was ready for us in the cabin. We had china plates to eat off of, and a mahogany table and arm-chairs, and I found a newspaper and put it by Mr. Crusoe’s plate, so that he could read the news at breakfast, as rich people on shore always do.

Mr. Crusoe braced up after breakfast, and found that he could walk pretty well. He was in first-rate spirits, and said the island was the very one where his grandfather lived. “He landed,” said Mr. Crusoe, “just about where we are now, and he had his house just by the side of that hill.”

“Then we can move right into his house and live there, can’t we?” said I.

“Of course we can,” Mr. Crusoe replied. “Only, you see, it must be awfully out of repair by this time. And then I think it very likely that Will Atkins and his gang burnt it before they left the island; for they must have left it or we would see some signs of them. I never did believe in that fellow’s reformation myself, although my dear grandfather did.”

“Well,” said I, “we’ll go ashore anyway and see. If you’ll help me, Mr. Crusoe, we’ll build a raft.”

“My grandfather built a raft, and we’ll do everything that he did. Only he didn’t have you to help him. I don’t know what to do about that,” he continued, looking puzzled—“I can’t drown you now, but you see yourself, Mike, that everybody ought to have been drowned except me.”

“You can drown me after we get ashore, if you like,” I said; “I don’t care much, I’m sure.” You see I felt a little aggravated that Mr. Crusoe should stand there and tell me I ought to have been drowned; but then I didn’t begin to know at that time how aggravating he could be. But he was a good man for all that.

The first thing I did was to chop away the bulwarks amidships, where the spare spars were lashed. Then I made a line fast to half a dozen of the spars and launched them overboard. Then I went overboard myself and lashed them together, and laid planks over them. A good part of the spars that had gone overboard where we first struck were still alongside, but they were so mixed up with the rigging that I didn’t try to use them.

“Now you want to cut a spare top-mast into three lengths and add them to your raft,” said Mr. Crusoe.

I never supposed that he knew what a top-mast was, but it seems he did, and the spare top-mast was just what the raft needed to make it float high enough out of the water. However, I afterwards found out that he got the idea of using a spare top-mast out of his grandfather’s book of travels.

The raft was now big enough, and we were all ready to load it.

“Now we want to take nothing ashore with us this first trip except things that we can’t get along without,” said I.

“We must take,” said Mr. Crusoe, just as if he was reciting a lesson out of a book, “three seamen’s chests broken open and filled with bread, rice, Dutch cheeses, dried goat’s flesh, and a little corn, besides some bottles of rum, the carpenter’s chest, two shot-guns, two pistols, two rusty swords, three barrels of gunpowder, and a bag of shot. I’ll help you look for them. That was my grandfather’s first load.”

“And it isn’t going to be our first load,” I answered. “Where’s our goat’s flesh? and what do we want of three barrels of gunpowder?”

Mr. Crusoe came and looked straight in my face with his wonderful bright eyes, and said, “Mike, we’ll take exactly what I said. You can take anything else you want to take, but you’ll never go ashore if you show a want of respect to my sainted grandfather.”

Well, I didn’t want to hurt Mr. Crusoe’s feelings, so I said I would do what he wanted. I couldn’t find any dried goat’s flesh, but Mr. Crusoe found a ham, and said that it was goat’s flesh, and I didn’t contradict him. We couldn’t find any barrels of gunpowder either, though we found one small keg of it.

The raft was big enough to carry a great deal more than Mr. Crusoe put on it, so, after he was satisfied, I got together two barrels of flour, a barrel of sugar, a bag of coffee, two breech-loading rifles, a lot of cartridges, Mr. Crusoe’s trunk, the captain’s chest, and the medicine-chest. Then I found two long oars and a big coil of rope, not much larger than signal halyards, and put them aboard the raft and shoved off.

The water was so shallow that we poled the raft along with the two oars very easily. I meant to land on the beach, but Mr. Crusoe said we must keep away to the right, and land a little way up a creek that we would find just there. As Mr. Crusoe seemed to know all about the island, I did as he said, and presently we saw the entrance of a little creek, and a short distance from the mouth we found a beautiful place to land.

We carried our cargo ashore and piled it up together, and started back to the ship for another load. The tide was coming in, and it was hard work to pole the heavy raft against it, so I went ashore on the beach opposite to where the wreck lay, and made one end of my rope fast to a tree, and coiled the rest down on the raft. The rope was long enough to reach from the shore to the wreck, and when, after we had got to the wreck, I made the other end of the rope fast in the main channels, I had a line by which I could haul the raft back and forth without any trouble.

That is, I could have done it, only Mr. Crusoe objected because his blessed old grandfather had not known enough to do the same thing, although, according to Mr. Crusoe’s account, his grandfather’s wreck lay nearer the shore than ours did. However, he agreed to let me haul the raft up close to the beach, but he wouldn’t let me land there, and insisted that we should pole the raft around to the creek.

For the second load Mr. Crusoe said that we must take a grindstone, a dozen hatchets, three crow-bars, seven muskets, and a roll of sheet-lead. There were only two hatchets on board the ship, and neither a grindstone nor a roll of sheet-lead, though what he wanted of sheet-lead I never knew. He was quite angry when he found that he couldn’t load up the raft with grindstones and lead, and said that if he ever got back to New York he would sue the owners of the ship for not supplying her with proper provisions.

I put the two hatchets, three crow-bars, and seven rifles—for we had no muskets—on the raft, and then I loaded it with useful things. I put two more barrels of flour, a barrel of beef, and a barrel of pork in the middle of the raft, and piled up a hundred tin cans of preserved meat and vegetables around them. Then I got some pots and pans from the galley, and some China plates and cups, and some knives and forks, from the steward’s pantry, for now that I had got out of the forecastle, I meant to live like a gentleman. I took all the captain’s clothes, and wanted to get the clothes belonging to the men, but I could not get at the chests because the forecastle was full of water. Last of all, I put four mattresses, four pillows, and a pile of sheets and blankets on the top of the barrels, and we then had about all the raft would carry.

Mr. Crusoe grumbled a little, for he said his grandfather never brought mattresses, or dishes, or canned provisions ashore, and that he did not think it was right for us to do it. I said, “Now just look here, Mr. Crusoe; I suppose your grandfather was a very nice man, and you may be sure that he would have brought canned provisions ashore only they weren’t invented when he was alive.”

That seemed to strike him as a good idea, and he said, “Well, perhaps you’re right, Mike, about the canned things; but we’ve no right to bring mattresses with us, and I’ll die before I’ll sleep on one of them.”

I wanted to tell him that the only reason his grandfather did not take a mattress ashore with him was that he didn’t have sense enough to be trusted alone on an island; but of course I didn’t say so. Why, that ridiculous old man never thought to take so much as a teakettle with him, as I afterwards found out; though, luckily, Mr. Crusoe did not think of it until a week or two after we had begun to live on the island.

While we were poling up the creek, Mr. Crusoe, not being a sailor-man, managed to run one end of the raft ashore in a shallow place, and the cargo came near sliding off into the water. He was just as pleased as he could be. “It’s all right, Mike, it’s all right,” he kept on saying. “My grandfather ran his raft ashore in just the same way, and we had to do it too. Now, we’ll wait for the tide to rise a foot higher, and then we’ll be afloat again.”

“‘IT’S ALL RIGHT, MIKE. MY GRANDFATHER RAN HIS RAFT ASHORE IN JUST THE SAME WAY.’”

We should have been in a nice scrape if the tide had been falling, but as it was rising, I knew the raft would float after a while. But I was not going to stay on it and do nothing for an hour or two, so I waded ashore and swam out to the ship. The wreckage of the main-mast was still floating alongside, although most of the other spars had gone adrift while the ship was on the reef. I cut the wreckage clear of the ship, and then by standing on it, and hauling in the line that I had made fast to the shore, I got the whole lot close up to the beach, and carried a rope from it to a tree, so that it could not go adrift again unless it should come on to blow a gale.

By the time I got back to the raft it was afloat again, and we soon got the cargo ashore. It was about time for dinner, and I built a fire, fried some of the ham that Mr. Crusoe would call dried goat’s flesh, and brought a jug of water from the creek about half a mile farther up, where the water was fresh. We had a very good dinner, and Mr. Crusoe did not find any fault with the plates, though he would occasionally grumble a little to himself about the mattresses.

We were too tired to make another trip to the wreck that day, and Mr. Crusoe’s ankle that was sprung still hurt him so much that he said he must lie down a while. He wouldn’t lie on a mattress, but he lay on the sand in the shade, and we both went to sleep for the rest of the afternoon.

CHAPTER III.

When we woke up, the sun was nearly down, and I told Mr. Crusoe we must hurry to get on board the ship before dark.

“What do you want to go on board the ship to-night for?” he asked.

“Why, to sleep, of course,” said I.

He looked really unhappy, and said, “Mike, I’m afraid you’re not quite right in your mind. The idea of going back and sleeping on that wreck! My grandfather slept on shore, and so will we.”

“But there isn’t the least danger in sleeping on board,” said I. “The ship will stay where she is, unless we get a heavy blow from the southward.”

Mr. Crusoe wouldn’t so much as answer, but he began to walk around and look up into all the trees. Presently he said, pointing to a big tree that was all surrounded with thorn-bushes, “There’s where I’m going to sleep.”

“But what do you want to sleep in a tree for?” I asked. “If you will sleep ashore, why don’t you sleep on the sand, where you can be comfortable?”

“And be eaten up by wild beasts half a dozen times before morning,” he replied.

I told him that in the first place there were no wild beasts on the Pacific islands, and that if there were they would not come down to the beach in the night, but would go where they could get fresh water.

“Michael Flanagan,” answered Mr. Crusoe, “if you only knew what you were saying you would be sorry. I’ve got to sleep in a tree for this one night, or else treat my grandfather’s memory with disrespect. Now be silent, or I shall be angry with you.”

When a man is as obstinate as that, what are you going to do about it? I just kept quiet, and made up a good bed for myself on the beach, while Mr. Crusoe tried to climb up the tree. He wouldn’t let me help him, because nobody helped his old lunatic of a grandfather, and he got two good falls among the thorns before he got up into the branches, and wedged himself into a place between two limbs, and said good-night.

It must have been about the middle of the night that he woke me up by falling down from the tree with an awful crash. He couldn’t get himself out of the thorn-bushes till I went and helped him, and then it took me about an hour to pick the thorns out of him. He had had enough of sleeping in a tree, and was willing to lie down on a mattress like a Christian; but I heard him groan a good deal before he finally dropped asleep.

I didn’t say anything to him in the morning about his obstinacy, but I only asked if all the thorns were out of him. He was quite pleasant, and said that he didn’t care anything about his fall, because he knew that he had done his duty. Of course, if he really considered it his duty to go to sleep in a tree and fall out of it, he did what was right; but I didn’t consider it my duty to be an idiot because somebody else’s grandfather was one.

We worked all that day bringing things ashore from the wreck, and must have brought enough canned provisions to last us for ten years, besides more flour, beef, pork, and bread. I brought one tremendous load of boards ashore, for I suppose the captain had expected to pick up a lot of Chinese passengers somewhere in China, and had brought the boards to make bunks with.

The last thing I did after we had knocked off work on the wreck was to cut a top-gallant sail adrift from the wreckage that I had towed ashore. We made a sort of tent of this, and Mr. Crusoe slept under it without saying a word. He had had enough of sleeping in trees, and I suppose that, if the truth was known, one night of that kind of lodging was all that his grandfather ever wanted.

As the weather looked settled, we agreed to take the next day for building a house instead of going to the wreck. Mr. Crusoe went to the hill on the north end of the island, and found the place where his grandfather used to live. It was a little level spot at the foot of the hill, where the rock rose up straight for about twenty feet.

“We’ll pitch a tent right against the rock,” said he, “and we’ll surround it with a fence made by driving stakes into the ground close together, and then we’ll dig a cave in the rock so as to have a cellar.”

“What do you want to live right up against a damp rock for?” I asked.

“So that when the cannibals come to attack us, nobody can get at us from the back of our castle,” he replied.

“They can’t get up on the hill and drop rocks down on us, and jump down right into the middle of our house, I suppose?” said I. “What’s the good of a fence and all that, when you put your house where anybody can jump down on to the roof of it?”

“Do you pretend to know more than my grandfather?” asked Mr. Crusoe, looking very fierce.

Of course I had to say I didn’t; and it was true too. I didn’t pretend to know more than the old man, for I knew I knew more. Why, a boy who had never been at sea more than two months would have been ashamed to choose such a place for a house.

“I wonder your grandfather didn’t build his house on the top of the hill,” I said, after a while. “Of course he had some good reason; but if he had done it he could have watched for ships, and could have defended himself against the cannibals—whoever they are.”

But Mr. Crusoe looked so furious that I gave up saying anything more about the place for the house, and we went to work and pitched the tent.

Then we cut a lot of stakes, and drove them in the ground about two inches apart, and Mr. Crusoe said they would grow and make a solid wall, which I didn’t believe. The fence was to be about fifty feet long, and it took us nearly all day to cut and drive stakes enough to make a piece of fence six feet long, so I saw we were going to have plenty of work.

We moved all the things into what was to be our front yard, and piled them up so as to make a wall. Mr. Crusoe wouldn’t leave any open place in this wall for an entrance, but he knocked together a sort of ladder, and said we could climb over the wall with it, and then pull it over after us. He tried it when he had got it finished, but it broke just as he got to the top of it, and as he fell he knocked down most of the upper part of the wall, which was made of tin cans, and I had fairly to dig him out from under them. Then he decided that we needn’t use a ladder until we had finished our regular fence, and that we might leave an opening in our wall of barrels and cans. He sometimes showed a little sense, especially after he had hurt himself.

You should have seen, though, what a rage he got into when I went up on the hill behind the tent and jumped down into the yard. He told me that if I ever did it again he should have to make an example of me, and said that no matter what it might cost, he would do his duty to his grandfather. Then all of a sudden he got over being angry, and took me by both hands, and said he loved me, and begged me with tears in his eyes to do as he wanted me to do. I promised that I would; for, aggravating as he was, he was good to me, and I was always anxious to please him.

For the next two weeks I went to the wreck two or three times every day, and brought ashore no end of things, while Mr. Crusoe worked part of the time at his fence, and part of the time at making a cave. The rock was soft and crumbling, and Mr. Crusoe worked his way into it with a crow-bar at a pretty good rate; but one day, after the cave was about six feet deep, part of the roof fell in on him, and buried him all but his head, so deep that he could not move. By good-luck this happened early in the morning, and I had plenty of time to dig him out. I got him out after working till long after noon, but all the time I expected the rock would cave in again and bury us both. After it was all over, Mr. Crusoe said that the cave was large enough for the present, and that he would not work any more on it until more important things were attended to, and in fact he let it alone for good and all.

We got the fence done at last, and made a good stout ladder so as to climb over it safely. But Mr. Crusoe would have the tops of the stakes cut to a sharp point, and as he was only a landsman, and couldn’t climb well, he was continually getting caught on the points; and once, when I came back from the wreck, I found him hanging with his head down, with his trousers caught on a sharp stake, and he said he had been hanging for two hours. After this he sawed off the points at the place where we climbed over the fence, and was able to keep himself right side up.

He wanted me to cut the ship’s cables into short lengths, and pile them up inside of the fence so as to strengthen it; but I explained to him that I couldn’t cut up chain-cables, and that even if I could, the lengths would be too heavy to bring ashore. His grandfather might have cut up the cables belonging to his own ship because they were made of hemp, but I told Mr. Crusoe that ships never carried hemp cables nowadays. He said it was an outrage, and he would make the owners smart for it, but all the same he had to give up his idea of strengthening the fence with cables. However, he dug up a great deal of earth in the front yard and piled it against the fence, and so made a beautiful hole for water to collect in whenever it should rain.

We had made loop-holes in the fence to shoot through, and nothing would satisfy Mr. Crusoe but to mount the rifles on gun-carriages like cannons, and have them always loaded and pointed out of the loop-holes. I knew well enough that he must have got this idea from his grandfather, and it was as ridiculous as most of that foolish old man’s ideas. In the first place, while the rifles were mounted, you could never hit anybody with them, unless somebody happened to be directly in front of them; and, in the second place, they were certain to be ruined by rust. But I let Mr. Crusoe have his own way with all but two rifles, and those, I told him, we must keep to carry with us when we went outside of the fence. He made the most rickety gun-carriages you ever saw, and if he had fired his rifles only once they would have kicked the carriages all to pieces. However, he was very proud of his work, and said that now the place began to look as it must have looked when his grandfather was there. That very night he thought he heard a noise, and got up and fell over one gun-carriage, and knocked it over against the next one, and that one fell against another, so that the whole of them came down, and one rifle went off of its own accord, and there was “daybreak to westward” for a few minutes, as Nigger Jim, who was one of the H. G. Thompson’s crew, was always saying when something extraordinary happened. The next day he said that he wouldn’t take the time just then to repair the gun-carriages, and that I might put the rifles in the tent. I told him that I supposed that rifles were not invented in his grandfather’s time, and he brightened up and said “that was so,” and that as we did not have any muskets like those that his grandfather had, he did not think that it was absolutely necessary for us to mount the rifles.

One day Mr. Crusoe took a piece of board, and cut on it in large letters, “I came on shore here on the 18th of September, 1884,” and nailed it to a big post, and set it up in a hole that he dug for it on the beach. In the side of the post he cut a notch every day, and a deeper one every Sunday. This, he said, would be our almanac; though what is the use of an almanac that does not give you the sun’s declination, and Greenwich time, and other things that I know you’ve got to get out of the almanac when you go to work up your observations, I can’t see.

The curious thing about Mr. Crusoe’s almanac was the way in which it made the time fly. Whenever Mr. Crusoe hadn’t anything else to do, he would go and cut two or three weeks of notches on his post. After we had been on the island only twenty-three days, according to my reckoning, the post showed that we had been there nearly three months, and Mr. Crusoe wouldn’t hear a word against it, but always insisted that his almanac was right. He would say one day, “Mike, we have now been here ten weeks, and I think we are getting on very slowly with our house” and the very next day he would say, “We have been here now thirteen weeks and four days, and our provisions are holding out very well.” I tried at first to remember the real dates, but Mr. Crusoe got me so confused that I had to give it up.

We had been ashore, I should think, about six weeks, and had pretty well stripped the ship of everything that was useful, when Mr. Crusoe proposed that we should begin to saw the ship into pieces and bring them ashore. I told him that the first heavy blow from the southward would bring on a sea that would break her up fast enough, but he would not be satisfied unless I would saw through every timber and stanchion and deck-beam. I had to begin it, just to satisfy him, though I knew it was all foolishness, but by good-luck it turned out that I only had to work at the job one day.

CHAPTER IV.

I was pretty tired when night came, after sawing away all day at the timbers of the wreck, but I didn’t like the looks of the sky, and I told Mr. Crusoe that it might rain before morning, and we’d better make ready for it, but he said “Oh no! it wouldn’t rain for at least a month yet, for the dry season wasn’t over.”

I had knocked up a bunk, that stood about a foot from the ground inside of the tent, to sleep in; but Mr. Crusoe wouldn’t sleep in a bunk, but slept on a mattress, with nothing between it and the ground but a half-inch plank. He had given up his notion that he mustn’t sleep on a mattress, but I suppose he bargained with his conscience by not sleeping in a bunk.

Soon after sunset the wind began to blow from the southward, and by the time we turned in, which was generally about half-past seven, because we had nothing to do after supper, there was a pretty stiff breeze. It freshened all through the night, and after a while it began to rain.

I slept soundly enough, but Mr. Crusoe waked me up in the night by climbing into my bunk and breaking the whole affair down; for I never meant to make it strong enough to hold two. When it broke down it landed us into a foot of water; and what, through being waked up so suddenly, and finding somebody hanging on to me, I couldn’t at first think where I was, and I had pretty nearly choked Mr. Crusoe to death before I really understood things.

The rain had run down from the hill into the enclosure where our tent stood, and as it couldn’t get out, owing to the fence being banked up with earth, it stayed there. It was, as I said, about a foot deep when I woke up, and it was getting deeper every minute. The water had roused Mr. Crusoe up about half an hour before he woke me, and after he had found it too cold to stand with his feet in the water any longer, he had tried to sit on the edge of my bunk till morning.

It was raining just as if the tanks that held the rain had burst and let it all out with a rush, instead of letting it run through a strainer, and come down in drops, as it generally does. I never saw it rain so hard before or since, and the water kept rising in our house so fast that we could see it rise.

My first idea was to knock a hole in the fence and let the water out, but it took me so long to do it, owing to the solid way in which the stakes were driven into the ground, that the water was nearer two feet than one foot deep when I finally managed to let it out. But all of it wouldn’t run out, for Mr. Crusoe had dug so much earth out of the front yard that it was lower than the ground outside the fence. As for mud, the whole place was just one big mud-hole, and when we tried to walk we kept constantly slipping up and sitting down in the water. So we gave it up after a while, and went outside and sat in the lee of a rock that kept a little of the full force of the rain off of us; but for all that, you could have wrung us both out every ten minutes, and filled a big bucket with water every time.

Mr. Crusoe felt so cold and miserable that he didn’t want to talk much. Besides, the wind howled so that we could hardly hear each other. He did say, however, two or three times, as if he was speaking to himself, “I can’t make it out; I can’t make it out.”

“What can’t you make out, Mr. Crusoe?” asked I, when the wind lulled a bit.

“Why, how it was that my grandfather wasn’t drowned out the same as we have been.”

“Perhaps it didn’t rain,” said I.

“But it did rain; for in my grandfather’s book he mentions a violent rain.”

“Then you may depend upon it that he got his house full of water, and went and built another in a better place,” I said, “only he felt ashamed to mention it.”

“Mike,” said Mr. Crusoe, “while I can’t allow you to talk in that way of my grandfather, I think you are partly right in what you say, for he did build another house, which he called his country-house, in a beautiful valley.”

“And I’ll bet you anything that he lived in his country-house all the year round, and gave up trying to live in a house right under the scuppers of a big hill the first time he found his bed all afloat.”

Mr. Crusoe didn’t answer me, so I knew he thought I was right, and after waiting a while I said,

“In the morning, Mr. Crusoe, if it stops raining, we’ll build a good, substantial plank house that will keep out the rain, and we’ll put it where the water will run off of it instead of into it. I’m sure that’s what your grandfather did when he built his country-house, and we ought to imitate him.” I just added that little remark to please Mr. Crusoe, for his grandfather must have been the worst man to imitate that ever lived. Why, a hand-organ monkey would have too much sense to imitate him.

Mr. Crusoe said that he was delighted that I was beginning to appreciate his grandfather, and that we’d build a country-house the first thing next day.

Well, the storm blew itself out by daylight, but it took a good six hours for the sea to go down. There wasn’t a particle of the wreck visible in the morning, for the wind and sea must have worked it off the beach, and carried it over towards the reef, and it must have sunk in deep water, for we never saw the first bit of wreckage afterwards. The spars that I had towed ashore were missing too, but some of them came on to the beach again at high tide a few days later.

Things were pretty damp in our house, but there was not much of anything that was really spoiled. The guns and all the iron tools were rusted, and the mattresses and blankets were soaking, but a little bright sunshine made them all right. Mr. Crusoe’s cave had caved in again, and was now spoiled for good; but as we did not intend to live in the house any longer, Mr. Crusoe didn’t take much interest in the cave. He said that we would live in our country-house, and keep the first house for a fort and a place to sleep in now and then.

We spent the morning in getting our things dry, and in the afternoon we selected a place for our new house, and pitched our tent there. The way we selected it was this: Mr. Crusoe wanted to go clear over to the other side of the island, where he said there was a beautiful valley, but I wanted to build on a little rising ground under some big trees. I got him to come and look at the place, but before he had begun to find fault with it he accidentally picked up a flat stone, and found “R. C., 1671,” scratched on one side of it. He said the letters had been scratched by his revered grandfather, and that the stone was a sign that we should build the house just where we stood, which was what I meant the stone to be when I scratched the letters on it, and dropped it where he could find it.

As Mr. Crusoe couldn’t remember how his grandfather’s country-house was built, he let me build the new house to suit myself. I began by setting four posts in the ground, one for each corner of the house, and then set other posts between them. To these I nailed planks on the inside of the house till the four sides were all covered. Then I planted another set of posts about a foot outside of the first posts, and planked these on the outside. In this way I had a double shell for the house, and I filled up the place between the two shells with dry sand rammed down hard. One side of the house I made four feet higher than the other side, so that I could make a slanting roof, and I lashed the roof beams to the upright posts, for I didn’t want the roof to blow off, and I was afraid to trust to nails.

I left a place for a door, and also for one window two feet square. In each side of the house I made loop-holes, out of which we could fire in every direction. The door I made of six thicknesses of one-inch planks, and swung it on two iron rods that once were pump rods on board the H. G. Thompson. I made a window-shutter as thick as the door, and put stout wooden rests on each side of the door and window in which I could put crow-bars, as bars to fasten them. The edges of the planks of the roof and sides of the house overlapped one another, so that no rain could get in.

Inside of the house I made two bunks, and put up a lot of shelves, so that I could put all our small things where they would be dry. The guns were hung on rests on each side of the house, so that at least one could always he handy to any one who was looking out of a loop-hole. Of course I made a good plank floor for the house, and you have no idea how comfortable and safe it was. Nobody could break open the door when once we had barred it; and if you had fired rifle-bullets at the house all day, not one of them could have gone through the wall.

I did not put any chimney on the house, for I knew I could not make the roof tight enough to keep out the rain where the chimney came through. You see I hadn’t lived in my grandmother’s shanty without learning something. Then I didn’t fill the house all up with tin cans, for they couldn’t be much hurt by rain; so I piled them all together outside of the house, and put a little tent over them. I made a fireplace out-doors under the trees, and put a sort of wooden roof over it, to keep rain from putting the fire out.

It took nearly six weeks to build this house, and when it was done Mr. Crusoe wanted to build a wall all around it. I asked him how long it was since we had driven in the stakes of the fence around our first house.

He went down to the beach and looked at his almanac, and said that it was thirteen months since we drove the first stake. According to my calculation it was about ten weeks.

“Are they beginning to sprout yet?” asked I.

“Well, no,” replied Mr. Crusoe, “I can’t really say they are.”

“Then,” said I, “you see we haven’t found the kind of stakes that your grandfather used, for if we had they’d have sprouted months ago.”

“That’s so,” said Mr. Crusoe, in a gloomy sort of way.

“Then we might as well give up building a fence. We’ve got a house now that nobody can get into, and what we want to do is to cut down the trees and bushes around the house, so that the hannibals can’t hide in them and shoot at us,” I said.

“Cannibals, boy; not hannibals,” exclaimed Mr. Crusoe.

“All right, then,” I answered; “call them anything you choose, and I’ll cut the trees down.”

I was surprised that he didn’t make some objection to cutting the trees down; but that was just his way. You never could tell beforehand whether he would be angry or pleased at anything you might propose.

However, I was very glad that I had got him out of the notion of building a fence; and it’s my belief that his grandfather’s yarn about fence-posts that sprouted was a regular twister. No man ever saw fence-posts growing, I don’t care whose grandfather he was.

Mr. Crusoe helped me cut down the trees, and I will say for him that there wasn’t a lazy bone in his whole body. One day when he was resting, and feeling of the edge of his axe, he said,

“Mike, I told you long ago that it was all wrong for yon to be here. When members of my family are shipwrecked they are always the only people saved. Now I ought to have come ashore alone, and you ought to have been drowned. You must see that.”

“I’m very sorry to incommode you, sir,” I replied, “but it’s too late now to be sorry that I wasn’t drowned.”

“I might kill you, I suppose,” continued Mr. Crusoe. “I suppose that would make it all right; but I don’t want to do it if I can help it. Still, there’s the fact that I’m not following my grandfather’s example in coming ashore alone, and living alone, and I feel uneasy about it.”

“Hadn’t we better wait till we get through this job, sir?” I asked. “You couldn’t cut down all these trees alone very well.”

“That’s so,” said he, brightening up. “I’ll not kill you anyway until we get this piece of ground cleared, and in the mean time we can talk it over. I’m sure I don’t want to kill you, Mike, if we can see any way out of it.”

This was a nice state of things. I began to think that perhaps Mr. Crusoe’s mind might have gone adrift, and that perhaps he really would try to kill me. But then I couldn’t really think that of him, for he had been so good to me, and I made up my mind that he was joking. However, I thought I’d be on the safe side, so I said,

“Mr. Crusoe, did your grandfather ever kill anybody except cannibals and such?”

“No,” said he, “I don’t think he did, except the mutineers that came ashore with Will Atkins.”

“Then you wouldn’t be following his example if you killed me, would you?” I asked.

“Perhaps you’re right, Mike,” he answered; “but don’t let us talk any more about it. I don’t think it’s a pleasant subject!”

And I’m sure I didn’t think so either.

CHAPTER V.

We had never explored the island, for we had been too busy with other things; but after our house was finished, Mr. Crusoe said that we must set out on an exploring expedition.

It was warm weather, but that didn’t prevent Mr. Crusoe from loading himself and me with about a thousand pounds of luggage. He carried in a belt around his waist a sword, a saw, a hatchet, and two revolvers. Then he lashed on his shoulders a basket holding two blankets and a lot of provisions, and he carried a shot-gun on one shoulder and a rifle on the other. He made me carry another load just like his own, and he grumbled because he did not have an umbrella to keep the sun off.

We started early in the morning to climb the big hill, at the foot of which we built our first house. If the luggage weighed a thousand pounds when we started, it weighed at least ten thousand before we got to the top of the hill. Mr. Crusoe’s sword and his saw kept getting between his legs and tripping him up every little while, and when he came down you’d have thought by the noise that a tin-peddler’s wagon had capsized. He fell on the edge of the saw once, but it was probably a good thing, for it helped him to get up quicker than I ever saw a man get up before. I expected to see some of his guns and pistols go off every time he fell, but they didn’t do it.

We were as hot and tired when we got to the top of the hill as if we had walked twenty miles, and Mr. Crusoe piled up his cargo on the ground and lay down to rest. We could see the whole island from the place where we were. It was about two miles across and three miles long, and the coral reef ran all around it, except just where there was the opening that we could see from the beach. Far away to the southward I could see land, but it was so far off that you could hardly tell it from a faint cloud.

I had brought the ship’s ensign in my basket unknown to Mr. Crusoe, and I now got it out, for I meant to set it, union down, on one of the big trees on the top of the hill.

Mr. Crusoe, tired as he was, jumped up and snatched it away from me.

“I know what you meant to do with that,” he said; “you were going to signal the cannibals that we are here.”

“I never thought about the cannibals,” said I, “and I don’t believe in them very much anyway. I was going to set the ensign as a signal of distress, so that some vessel can see it, and come and take us off.”

“That’s just as bad,” said Mr. Crusoe. “You are getting tired of this place, and want to get away from me. You’re an ungrateful boy. There’s hardly another boy living who wouldn’t be glad to be shipwrecked on Robinson Crusoe’s own island, and yet you can’t appreciate it, and want to get away.”

“But, Mr. Crusoe,” I said, “we must get away from here some time, you know, and we never will unless some ship comes and takes us off.”

“No ship will come until we’ve been here twenty-eight years,” replied he. “Of course the Spanish ship will come and be wrecked here after a while, but that won’t be any help to us. No ship would see your flag, if you did put it on the top of a tree, until the twenty-eight years are up, so don’t say any more about it.”

I put the flag back in the basket, but I did say, “Why don’t you want to get away from here, Mr. Crusoe?”

“Never you mind,” he answered; “I’m free now, and I mean to stay so for twenty-eight years.”

I remembered then that Mr. Crusoe’s servant used to watch him pretty closely when we were at sea, and I thought it was just possible that Mr. Crusoe had done something, and that the man was taking him to San Francisco to put him in prison. That would account for his being so willing to stay on the island.

We stayed on the hill till we got good and rested, and then Mr. Crusoe said that, since we could see the whole of the island, it wasn’t worth while to explore it any more that day, and we would go home and put away our luggage. I was glad to hear this, but I thought I had seen some animals moving across a clearing on the other end of the island, and when I pointed them out to Mr. Crusoe he said they were goats.

After that he didn’t think any more about going home, but said we would go and shoot a couple of goats before we did anything else. He started off in a great hurry, but before he had gone ten feet his sword tripped him up, and he rolled part way down the hill, scattering guns and pistols and things all around him, and finally brought up with his head against a stone. He was insensible when I got to him, but a cut that the hatchet had made in the side of his head was bleeding nicely, and that brought him to in a very few minutes. As soon as he was able to sit up, he said he must go home and lie down, so we gave up the goats for that day.

It was two days before Mr. Crusoe was well enough to explore any more, and even then he was too weak and stiff to carry a very heavy load, so he took only one gun and his revolvers. This time we walked along the shore till we came to the other end of the island, when Mr. Crusoe suddenly remembered that we must find a magnificent cave that his grandfather used to keep somewhere near the south side of the island.

There was no sign of a cave where we were, so we went into the woods and searched everywhere. Whenever Mr. Crusoe saw a hole in the ground large enough to put his arm into, he would think he had found his cave; and it was very lucky that there were no snakes on the island, or he would have run foul of some of them at the bottom of some of the holes that he put his arm or a leg into.

“BEFORE HE HAD GONE TEN FEET HIS SWORD TRIPPED HIM UP.”

We searched for that cave for at least two hours, and I was beginning to believe that there wasn’t any cave on the whole island, when we came to a small hill with a hole in the side of it, just big enough to get your head and shoulders into it. “Here we are at last,” says Mr. Crusoe; and he lit a candle that he had brought with him, and took his coat off, and jammed his head and shoulders into the hole. For some reason he couldn’t get any farther—I always supposed the reason was that the cave was only two or three feet deep, though he always pretended it was his grandfather’s genuine private cave—and when he tried to back out again he found he couldn’t do that. So there he was, stuck fast, and pretty mad at everything. The candle had gone out, but not until it had set his hair on fire and burned his eyebrows and eyelashes, and the candle-smoke had got into his eyes, besides partly choking him. He was fitted into the hole so tight that his voice sounded as if he were half a mile away, but I managed to understand most of what he said.

I got a good hold of both of his legs, and braced myself and pulled my very best, but his boots fetched loose, and I sat down pretty hard, with a boot in each hand. Then I got a better hold of his ankles, and hauled away, but I couldn’t start him; and after a while Mr. Crusoe said that he thought he had begun to come apart at the waist, and that I needn’t pull any more.

Then I thought I would try oil; so I went back to the house and got a bottle of sweet-oil, and poured it on him as near to his shoulders as I could reach, and then took a fresh pull at him, but I couldn’t start tack nor sheet of him. He was getting low-spirited by this time, and said he didn’t believe he could ever get out of that hole, but I told him that if he didn’t eat anything for a few days he would be sure to thin down, so that I could pull him out.

However, he did not want to wait so long, and proposed that I should get a crow-bar and break the rock away around his shoulders. He was giving me a good deal of trouble, but I didn’t mind that, for I was in hopes that he would have had enough of hunting for caves if he once got out of the one he was in. So I went all the way back to the house once more and got a crow-bar, and went to work at the rock. Of course I couldn’t help hitting him occasionally, but I didn’t do him any serious harm. It was slow work, but I gradually broke the rock away, so that by an extra heavy pull I dragged him out.

What with his hair and eyebrows having been burned, and his face smoked and scratched, and his clothes torn and soaked with oil, and bloody on account of two or three digs that I had accidentally given him with the crow-bar, Mr. Crusoe looked pretty bad when he came out of the cave. But he was very grateful to me, and said I had saved his life a second time, and that he certainly wouldn’t kill me for a week yet.

I supposed he would have been willing to quit searching for his grandfather’s caves and things; but no! he insisted upon looking for a valley full of grapes, where his grandfather had a country-house. So, after he had taken a dip in the surf, and made himself look a little more decent, we marched on again.

We did not find any grapes, though we searched the island all over for them, and at last Mr. Crusoe had to give it up, and admit that there wasn’t a grape on the island. He explained it by saying that Will Atkins and his gang naturally made wine out of the grapes, and got drunk, and then tore the vines up by the roots. As near as I could make out, this Will Atkins was the captain of a gang of train-robbers who lived on the island when Mr. Crusoe’s uncle was there. There were a lot of Spaniards too, Mr. Crusoe said, who lived with Will Atkins, but were very good men; so I suppose they brought information to Will Atkins, and stood in with him, but didn’t actually knock people down and rob them. If old Mr. Crusoe had been half the man Mr. Crusoe pretended to think he was, he would have taken his seven guns and cleaned out the whole island.

We found the valley we were looking for by following old Mr. Crusoe’s sailing directions, which were: to go up the creek where we first landed till we came to the end of it, and then to cross over a little hill. Mr. Crusoe said that the valley was all right, and looked just as it ought to have looked, except that there were no grapes; but I showed him that there was no end of cocoa-nut-trees, and that cocoa-nuts were a great deal more useful than grapes.

“Were there cocoa-nut-trees here, sir, when your grandfather was here?” I asked Mr. Crusoe.

“I suppose there were,” he replied; “for in his book he speaks of ‘cocoa-trees,’ which must have been the same thing.”

“Then, of course, he made dishes out of the shells, and drank the milk, and made cocoa-nut pies and such,” I continued.

“He didn’t do anything of the kind,” answered Mr. Crusoe; “at least, I don’t think he could have made cocoa-nut pies, for he was never sick but once; and I know he didn’t use cocoa-nut dishes, because he made clay dishes.”

“Well,” said I, “we can use cocoa-nuts, can’t we, whether he did or not?”

“Mike,” said Mr. Crusoe, looking at me as if I wasn’t fit to live, “if you touch even the outside of a cocoa-nut you’ll wish that you had eaten a dozen cocoa-nut pies—that is, if I can find a way to make you suffer as you would deserve to suffer. How dare you propose to do what my grandfather didn’t do!”

So when I wanted a cocoa-nut I had to watch my chance and take one when Mr. Crusoe was out of sight. This, of course, made me the more anxious for cocoa-nuts, and twice I made myself pretty sick by eating too many. I don’t think that three or four cocoa-nuts would hurt anybody, but you can’t eat many more at one time without running the risk of being twisted all up into a Turk’s-head knot.

Mr. Crusoe insisted that we must build a country-house in the valley. I had had about enough of building houses, and I told him so, but it didn’t make any impression on him. His grandfather had a country-house in that very valley, and so we must have one. I suppose if his grandfather had happened to have a broken leg anywhere on the island, we should have had to break one of our legs in the same place.

I said to him, “Mr. Crusoe, now just look at this a minute. Did your grandfather have three houses?”

“No, I can’t say he did.”

“But if we build a house here we shall have three, and I’m sure that will be wrong,” I said.

Mr. Crusoe didn’t say anything, but just stood and looked at me.

“Then,” I went on, “your grandfather didn’t have a house in a cocoa-nut valley, but in a grape valley. Now this is a cocoa-nut valley, and I don’t believe your grandfather would ever have been willing to build a house right in the middle of a cocoa-nut grove. Why, it seems to me it would be almost wicked to do such a thing. Of course we should both be glad to build a new house, but I think we ought to be sure that it is the kind of thing that your grandfather would have done.”

Mr. Crusoe was so pleased that he was almost ready to hug me, and he said that we would wait a few days, and his grandfather would probably appear to him in a dream and tell him just what to do. So I got rid of building another house, for Mr. Crusoe was never able to dream about it, although he tried his best.

CHAPTER VI.

Mr. Crusoe had been so busy hunting for caves and valleys that he had not had time to hunt for goats; but after he had given up his idea of building another house, he said we would shoot two or three goats, and catch some more, so that we could have a flock of tame goats, and have milk and butter and cheese.

We each took two guns with us, but we left the swords and saws and hatchets at home. I wanted to go straight to the place where we saw the goats, but Mr. Crusoe said they were so wild that we could never get near enough to them to shoot them unless we could get on the top of a hill when the goats were in a valley. We found a good place half-way up a hill, where we could hide behind some bushes, and in a little while we saw a flock of about thirty goats, and shot two of them.

We carried the goats home, though they were pretty heavy, and then Mr. Crusoe skinned them, and put the skins out to dry in the sun, while I roasted a splendid big piece of goat for dinner. But we couldn’t eat it, because it was a piece of a goat old enough to have known Mr. Crusoe’s grandfather, and Mr. Crusoe said that we would go out again and shoot a kid. This time we shot a kid and another old goat, and when we had skinned them both we buried all three of the old goats, and had a good dinner of roast kid.

The next day Mr. Crusoe made me go with him into the valley where we killed the goats, and dig what he called a pitfall. This was a hole six feet deep and about three feet wide, and he meant it for a trap to catch goats. When it was finished he covered the top of it with big weeds like mullein-stalks, so that when the goats came to walk on it they would fall in.

It was a very nice trap, I suppose, but it never caught anything but Mr. Crusoe. We used to go to it to look for goats every night and morning for about a week, but no goat was ever stupid enough to walk into it. The last time, however, that we went to it Mr. Crusoe went too near the edge, and it caved in with him. He never could have got out of the trap alone, but as I was there I pulled him out without much trouble.

I said to him that if he would leave it to me I would catch as many goats as he wanted, and he said I could do what I liked, but that he didn’t want anything more to do with pitfalls.

I took half a dozen old tomato-cans that we had emptied, and dropped them in a sort of careless way where I knew the goats would find them, and then hid behind a tree. Pretty soon the goats came along on their way to the creek to get a drink, and as soon as they saw the tomato-cans they went at them as if they were starving, and I had no trouble in walking right up to them, and making a line fast around the necks of an old goat and her three kids. You see I knew, from living in my grandmother’s shanty, that there is nothing that goats are so fond of as they are of tomato-cans, and so I felt sure that by using tomato-cans as ground-bait I could catch goats as easy as anything.

It struck me as a very curious thing that when I started for home, leading the three kids and the goat, all the rest of the flock came after me, and didn’t seem to be in the least bit afraid. They followed me all the way to the house, and when Mr. Crusoe came out they crowded around him, and you would have thought he was their dearest friend instead of being a complete stranger.

Mr. Crusoe, of course, had an explanation ready. He said that we must have been very stupid not to remember that his grandfather tamed all the goats on the island, and that instead of being wild goats these were some of those that belonged to his grandfather. He said that what proved this was that the goats were so friendly with him, and that they evidently mistook him for his grandfather. He was as pleased as he could be about it, and fed the goats with all the rubbish that was lying around the house. When I found out that the goats were tame, I let those loose that I had caught, and the flock went and lay down in the shade of the house, as if they meant to live with us for the next twenty-eight years.

When they were hungry or thirsty they would wander away, but they always came back again; and all the rest of the time that we were on the island those goats fairly lived with us, and you couldn’t get up in the night without falling over them.

I could not think what Mr. Crusoe wanted to do with the goat-skins; but when they were dry he went to work to make clothes out of them. He made himself a pair of breeches that came down to his knees, a jacket without any sleeves, and a tremendous big cap that ran up to a point about two feet above the top of his head, and had a big flap on the back of it which hung down over the back of his neck. It was the ugliest and stiffest and heaviest suit of clothes that was ever made, and when Mr. Crusoe had it tried on, and found that the breeches were too small and the coat too big, he said he would give it to me.

However, he didn’t give it to me until about a week later, and by that time he had a new suit made for himself. The morning after he had finished it he woke me up to build the fire, and for about a minute he frightened me nearly out of my mind; for he had on all his goat-skin clothes, and looked worse than any heathen that ever was born. I couldn’t just at first think who he was, and I really thought that the cannibals he was always talking about had boarded us and were going to eat us.

Mr. Crusoe handed me what he called my suit of goat-skin clothes, and told me to put them on. I tried to argue with him, but it wasn’t of any use, especially as he had taken my regular clothes and locked them up or hid them somewhere. He told me that we had been on the island nearly three years, and our clothes were all worn out, so we must either wear goat-skin clothes or no clothes at all; that his grandfather wore goat-skin clothes of the same pattern as those he wanted me to wear; and, finally, that he’d give me just ten minutes to get into the goat-skins, and that if I didn’t choose to do it he would see that there would be a nice coffin for me to wear.

It didn’t take me over five minutes to put on the goat-skin clothes after I saw that Mr. Crusoe was in dead earnest. I could have made a pair of breeches out of stove-pipe that would have been easy and comfortable by the side of those that Mr. Crusoe gave me; and as for the cap, it was heavier than a flour-barrel, and nothing like as soft. What made me so disgusted was that both Mr. Crusoe and I had lots of decent Christian clothes that would have lasted us for three or four years, but he was that aggravating that he wouldn’t wear them, and wouldn’t let me wear them.

We couldn’t eat much breakfast that morning, and I suppose it was because we looked so frightful that we took each other’s appetites away. And then we had to eat standing up, for the goat-skin was so stiff that we couldn’t sit down until we had pounded our breeches two or three hours with the back of an axe. The goats themselves did not know us till we spoke to them, and when they first saw us they started on a run for the woods.

“HE LOOKED WORSE THAN ANY HEATHEN THAT EVER WAS BORN.”

Mr. Crusoe must have found his clothes as hard to wear as mine were, but he bore it, and never gave the least sign that he was uncomfortable. I didn’t dare to say anything before him, but I used to go off by myself and take my clothes off every little while and be comfortable; that is, I was comfortable after the sun got through blistering me, which it did at first.

If our clothes had really been worn out we could have made good clothes out of sail-cloth; and so could that wretched old idiot Mr. Crusoe’s grandfather, if he had only had the least bit of sense; for, according to Mr. Crusoe, he saved a great deal of canvas from his wreck. But of course he did the most stupid and preposterous thing he could do, for that was what he always did. Give him a choice of two courses to steer, one right and one wrong, and he’d never fail to take the wrong one.

You may say that, being all alone, and his own master, old Mr. Crusoe had a right to do what he pleased about building houses and making clothes. I don’t say he hadn’t, provided he was never going to have a grandson; but you see he did have a grandson, and I was cast away with that grandson, and then the consequences of old Mr. Crusoe’s foolishness all came on me. I think that if a man is cast away all alone it is his duty to set an example to other people that may be cast away after him, instead of doing the wrong thing every chance he gets.

Mr. Crusoe wasn’t satisfied with what he had done in making clothes. He said that we must have goat-skin umbrellas, and carry them over our heads to keep the sun off. I took the liberty of telling him that since he was a landsman it was all right for him to carry an umbrella, but that it would be a disgrace to a sailor to carry one, so he agreed to let me live without an umbrella. He killed four goats, and used their skins to cover the frame of an umbrella that he made partly out of wire and partly out of wood. When it was done it would keep the rain off and the sun off, and I believe it would have kept off a shower of grape-shot, but it was so heavy that Mr. Crusoe could only carry it by holding it with both hands, and then it tired him so that he couldn’t walk half a mile with it.

“What puzzles me,” he said to me after he had tried his umbrella, “is to understand how my grandfather could have carried that umbrella of his and a gun on each shoulder at the same time. He must have been the strongest, as well as the best and wisest, man that ever lived. Don’t you think so, Mike?”

“Certainly,” said I. “He must have been stronger than Samson, for Samson never carried two guns at the same time that he was carrying off the gates of Delilah.”

This pleased Mr. Crusoe, for he didn’t understand that by saying what I did I meant to say that his grandfather didn’t tell the truth about his great feat with two guns and a goat-skin umbrella. For you can’t make me believe that any man could carry a gun on each shoulder, and at the same time carry an umbrella in both hands, weighing about as much as a spare top-gallant mast, and spreading as much surface to the wind as a main-royal.

After a few days Mr. Crusoe gave up trying to carry his umbrella, and pitched it like a tent in our front yard, and the whole flock of goats used to come and lie under it in the middle of the day, and sleep under it at night. It blew over once or twice, but after that I made guys fast to it and led them to trees, and it was so nice and pleasant under the umbrella that I proposed to Mr. Crusoe that we should live under it altogether instead of living in our house, but he wouldn’t do it.

The goat-skin cap troubled him almost as much as the umbrella. I lost mine two or three days after it was given to me, though you can hardly imagine how much planning and smart seamanship it took to lose that cap in the water in just such a way that I couldn’t fish it out again. After that I went bareheaded, which was a great deal more comfortable than wearing a heavy cap, and I could see that Mr. Crusoe envied me.

He wouldn’t lose his cap, but he got into a habit of taking it off and carrying it under his arm whenever we were in the shade. Then he said that he was afraid he might drop it and lose it some day, so he fastened a lanyard to it, which he put around his neck, and which let the cap hang at his side under his left arm. Next he began to pick up pebbles and bits of wood whenever we were walking together, and as his cap was swinging handy at his side, he would drop his pebbles and things into it. So before very long he gave up using his cap for anything but a bag, and never thought of putting it on his head. I suppose he sometimes wished that he dared to wear his old comfortable Christian hat that he brought ashore from the wreck, but he was so much more comfortable with his goat-skin cap swinging at his side than he was when he used to try to wear it on his head that he was probably pretty well satisfied.

I thought of losing my goat-skin clothes, but I knew it would be of no use, and that Mr. Crusoe would be sure to build new ones for me, so I bore them as well as I could, and tried to enjoy seeing Mr. Crusoe suffer in his.

CHAPTER VII.

It was not very long after we had moved into our goat-skin clothes that Mr. Crusoe got up early one morning, and came and stood over me with an axe in his hand as I was lying asleep on my bed. I woke up suddenly, and saw him looking very solemn, and I thought at first that he must have been taken sick, so I asked him what was the matter, and if I could do anything for him.

“Nothing is the matter with me,” he replied; “but I am sorry you woke up, for I was just going to kill you.”

“That’s very kind in you, I’m sure,” said I; “but don’t you think, Mr. Crusoe, that you could manage to get along without killing me till after breakfast? I ought to get up and start the fire, you know.”

Now Mr. Crusoe couldn’t bear to start a fire, and whenever he tried it he always got his throat and eyes full of smoke, and couldn’t get anything to burn except kindlings. So he was glad to get rid of making a fire and getting breakfast that morning, and he told me that on second thoughts I might live till the coffee was ready.

It took me a good while to make a fire that morning, and I pretended that I couldn’t split kindlings without the axe, and when I once got the axe into my hands I took very good care not to let Mr. Crusoe get hold of it again. I made up my mind, however, that Mr. Crusoe must give up his notion about killing me, for it was really getting pretty dangerous, now that he had got the idea of knocking me on the head with the axe whenever he could catch me asleep. So, while the coffee was boiling, I said to him, “Mr. Crusoe, the reason why you are going to kill me is that your grandfather wasn’t cast ashore with an intelligent sailor-man, isn’t it?”

“That’s just it, my dear boy,” said he.

“But,” said I, “there was his man Friday, that I’ve heard you talk about. Now why shouldn’t I be your man Friday? It won’t do for you to try to get on without one, you know very well; and I don’t see where your Friday is to come from unless I help you out.”

“That’s an excellent idea, Mike,” exclaimed Mr. Crusoe. “And what’s more, if you are Friday I needn’t kill you; and I do assure you I don’t want to kill you if it can be avoided.”

“All right,” said I, “I’m your man Friday, and I hope you won’t give yourself the least trouble after this about killing me.”

Mr. Crusoe was as pleased with the notion of turning me into Friday as if he had been made a captain in the navy, but he said I couldn’t be made into Friday by just saying so, and that he would have to think how to do it in the correct way.

After breakfast Mr. Crusoe told me that I must burn a piece of cork and black myself all over, and that I might move out of my goat-skin clothes, and wear nothing but a towel tied round my waist. This suited me perfectly, and in a few minutes I was as black as a native African king. Then Mr. Crusoe told me I must walk about a mile down the beach, and then turn and run back to the house, and he would meet me, and consider that I was Friday.

I can’t tell you how nice it was to get rid of my goat-skin clothes. I felt as light as a feather; and after I had walked a mile away, and turned to run back, I felt as if I could run for a week without stopping.

I was running my best when Mr. Crusoe stepped out from the woods and aimed his gun almost at me. I thought first that he was going to shoot me, so the instant he fired I dropped flat on the beach, and then jumped up again and ran towards him, so as to get hold of his gun before he could load.

But he hadn’t fired at me after all. As I came towards him he put his gun down on the ground and smiled from ear to ear, and beckoned me to come to him in the most friendly sort of way. Then I remembered what he had told me about the way in which his grandfather had introduced himself to Friday by shooting a cannibal who was hungry, and was chasing Friday so as to catch him and put him on the coals.

When I came where Mr. Crusoe was he patted me on the shoulder and said, “Good fellow! poor fellow! your enemies are killed and you are safe now.” He couldn’t have been kinder if I had been a dog; and when he took me by the hand and led me back to the house, and made me lie down and drink another cup of coffee, I was pretty well satisfied to be Friday.

MIKE TAKES THE PART OF “MAN FRIDAY.”

He began calling me Friday at once, and never called me anything else except once or twice when he got very angry at something and called me “You Mike!” When I began to talk back to him he stopped me, and said, “Friday, you talk too plain. You mustn’t say, ‘That coffee’s awful good!’ but you must say, ‘Him coffee berry muchee good!’ Remember that you’re a poor, ignorant savage, just beginning to learn English, and don’t let me have to correct you again.”

I was disappointed to find that I had to climb into my goat-skin clothes again; and when I had finished the coffee, and Mr. Crusoe showed me the clothes, and said, “Now, Friday, you must put on these clothes,” I said, “I do wish, Mr. Crusoe, you’d let me go as I am now.” He looked very angry, and said, “What did you say, Friday? Your broken English isn’t very easy to understand.” I knew what he meant then, and said, “Me no likee clothes. Me no wearee clothes in my country.” This pleased him better, but all the same I had to put the clothes on.

I found it pretty easy to talk as Mr. Crusoe wanted me to, and after a while it seemed perfectly natural to be a man Friday. It was a nuisance to have to black myself all over every time after I had been in swimming, and once I tried to get Mr. Crusoe to let me black nothing but my face and hands, but he wouldn’t agree to it. I really began to feel as if I was a real black savage; and as Mr. Crusoe never said anything more about killing me, I could go to sleep without fear of having my brains knocked out with the axe.

The worst thing about it was that Mr. Crusoe would insist on instructing me, as he called it. He would make me sit down by him and listen while he told me that there was more of the world than the island where we were, and there were great nations of white people who built ships and railroads and all sorts of things; just as if I didn’t know all about it a great deal better than he did, who had never been on board a ship but once. However, I had to listen respectfully, and I used to remember that, after all, it was easier to sit still and let a man talk than it was to work hard either afloat or ashore. But one day he tried to tell me what a ship was like. He called it a “big canoe,” and I never heard any man talk such nonsense as he did when he described how a ship is rigged. I really couldn’t stand it, so I said, “You no talkee sense. Gimme rest; you makee me tired,” and I got up and left him. After that he didn’t talk to me any more about ships.

Another thing that bothered me was that Mr. Crusoe would make me tell him all sorts of yarns about my country. He didn’t mean America, nor yet Ireland, but some heathen country not far from our island, where he maintained that I used to live. Of course my stories didn’t suit him until I found out just what he wanted me to tell. I had to tell him that the tribe of savages that I belonged to used to fight with another tribe. That was partly true of the Flanagans in old Ireland, for I have often heard my father say how they used to fight with the Maguires; but I thought things had come to a pretty pass when I had to call a respectable, decent family like the Flanagans a tribe of savages.

Then, too, Mr. Crusoe was bound to make me tell him that there were a whole ship’s company of Spaniards in my country. I had to make believe that they had been shipwrecked there, and whenever we talked about them Mr. Crusoe would sigh, and say that if we only had a boat we would set sail and find the Spaniards, and bring them to the island. Once he said, “We had better make a canoe, Friday, and have it all ready, so that when your father comes we can send him in it to bring the Spaniards here.”

I was so astonished to hear him say that my father was coming that I almost spoke English to him; but I recollected in time that I was Friday, so I only said, “What you meanee?”