A new Robinson Crusoe

by W. L. Alden

He suffered a good deal trying to eat his salmon without a plate. He had to eat it out of the can, and I could see that he didn’t like it because I did the same; but he wasn’t quite mean enough to tell me that I couldn’t have any salmon. When I was ready for my coffee I hunted up an empty peach can and used it for a cup. Mr. Crusoe thought that this was a fine idea, and so he found an empty can and poured himself a cup of coffee. But the ragged edge of the can cut his tongue and caught in his beard, and he spilled his coffee all over his legs, and then marched into the house in a rage.

I didn’t care so very much about the broken crockery, but it did amuse me to see Mr. Crusoe suffering from his own foolishness. He had spoiled his own breakfast, and I knew that he would find it harder yet to eat his dinner without any dishes.

After Mr. Crusoe had got over being angry about his coffee, he told me that we must make some dishes at once. We went down to the edge of the creek, where there was a bed of clay, and Mr. Crusoe told me to make a few platters, and said that he would make a pot.

We worked over those dishes for the rest of the day, and Mr. Crusoe got himself all covered with clay. The gnats and flies kept biting him on the face, and whenever he slapped his face he pasted a lot of clay over it. The clay would stick to his face and hair as firm as anybody could have wanted it to, but we could not make our dishes stick together. Mr. Crusoe’s pot kept falling to pieces as fast as he tried to make it; and though I once or twice got a plate to stick together while it was wet, it would crack and crumble as soon as the sun began to dry it.

But Mr. Crusoe wasn’t discouraged. He said that all the dishes wanted was to be baked in a fire. He gave up making a pot for that day, but he managed to make two cups, and then we built a fire and put the cups and a plate that I had made on to bake. They crumbled in the fire quicker than they did in the sun, and we had to give it up and eat our supper out of old tin cans.

Mr. Crusoe must have felt a little ashamed of having broken up the crockery, for he stuck to making dishes out of clay almost as well as the clay stuck to him. He remembered that his grandfather glazed his dishes with lead, and so he tried to do the same thing. But he didn’t know how to glaze dishes any more than I did, and the only thing he succeeded in doing was to burn himself all over with melted lead. I gave the whole thing up long before he did, and told him that I would wait till he found out how to make clay dishes before I would try it again. He kept at work a day after this, but finally he had to give it up.

Then he had another bright idea, and that was to make glass dishes out of sand. He said that sand was about the same thing as glass, and that we could melt sand and pour it into moulds, and have elegant glass dishes. But he could never get his fire hot enough to melt the sand. Besides, I knew very well that sand wasn’t glass, for there never were broken windows and tumblers enough in the whole world to make as much sand as there was on the island.

We had rather hard work to get along with no crockery except tin cans. We could use them well enough for cups and things to hold soup, but we couldn’t cut up meat on the bottom of a tin can as if it was a plate. I made some plates by splitting the tin cans and hammering the pieces out flat, but Mr. Crusoe hated to use them, because he said that he didn’t like the taste of tin, and because every now and then his dinner would slide off his tin plate into his lap.

After he had decided that he couldn’t make clay or glass dishes, he gathered together some pieces of broken crockery and tried to stick them together with some glue that was in the ship’s stores; but he had broken the crockery into such little pieces that he could only find a very few that were large enough to stick together. And then the glue wouldn’t hold the pieces together long enough for him to eat off of his mended plate, so he had to give this plan up too.

Mr. Crusoe became very much discouraged about his crockery, and I am sure that he was awfully sorry that he had broken it all up. When he thought how comfortable he used to be with good clothes to wear and nice crockery, it stands to reason that he must have wished that he hadn’t been so foolish as to destroy them all. But he wasn’t the kind of man to admit anything of the kind. All he did was to undress and go to bed, and have me bring his meals to him. He said he was sick, and perhaps he thought he was, but it is my opinion that he stayed in bed because he was sick of wearing goat-skin clothes. His goat-skin trousers had worn all the skin off of his knees, but he had nothing else to put on, and had either to go to bed or to stand the pain of the trousers.