A new Robinson Crusoe

by W. L. Alden

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.