“I never knew that you had been to Juan Fernandez,” said Friswell.
And then I saw how I could score off Friswell.
“I said Robinson Crusoe's island, not Alexander Selkirk's,” I cried. “Alexander Selkirk's was Juan Fernandez, Robinson Crusoe's was Tobago in the West indies, which Dorothy and I explored some years ago.”
“Of course I should have remembered that,” said he. “I recollect now what a stumbling-block to me the geography of Robinson Crusoe was when I first read the book. A foolish explanatory preface to the cheap copy I read gave a garbled version of the story of Selkirk and his island, and said no word about Daniel Defoe having been wise enough to change Juan Fernandez for another.”
“You were no worse than the writer of a paragraph I read in one of the leading papers a short time ago, relative to the sale of the will which Selkirk made in the year 1717—years after Captain Woodes Rodgers had picked him up at the island where he had been marooned nearly four years before,” said Dorothy, who, I remembered, had laughed over the erudition of the paragraph. “The writer affirmed that the will had been made before the man 'had sailed unwittingly for Tristan d'Acunha'—those were his exact words, and this island he seemed to identify with Bishop Keber's, for he said it was 'where every prospect pleases and only man is vile.' What was in the poor man's mind was the fact that some one had written a poem about Alexander Selkirk, and he mixed Cowper up with Heber.”
“You didn't write to the paper to put the fellow right,” said Heywood.
“Good gracious, no!” cried Dorothy. “I knew that no one in these aeroplaning days would care whether the island was Tristan d'Acunha or Juan Fernandez. Besides, there was too much astray in the paragraph for a simple woman to set about making good. Anyhow the document fetched £60 at the sale.”
“You remember the lesson that was learnt by the man who wrote to correct something a newspaper had written about him, said Heywood. The editor called me a swindler, a liar, and a politician,' said he, relating his experience, 'and like a fool 1 wrote to contradict it. I was a fool: for what did the fellow do in the very next issue but prove every statement that he had made!'”
“Oh, isn't it lucky that I didn't write to that paper?” cried Dorothy.
But when we began to talk of the imaginary sufferings of Robinson Crusoe, and to try to imagine what were the real sufferings of Selkirk, Friswell laughed, saying,—