A new Robinson Crusoe

by W. L. Alden

He kept in about the same condition for three days, and then he seemed a little better. This was just after he had taken a dose out of a big square bottle, so I hoped I had found the right medicine. The next time his medicine was due I gave him another dose out of the same bottle, and as the powders were beginning to run low, I gave up serving them out. But I hadn’t found the right medicine yet; for a little while after he had taken the second dose he became just as if he had been hit on the head and stunned, and his hands and legs were cold. I gave him some brandy, which brought him to, and made up my mind that the kind of medicine that is in square bottles was not good for him.

So I went back to my old plan of giving him a dose out of each bottle; and as I had found three boxes of pills in the bottom of the chest, I gave him one of each kind, making three altogether, every two hours; that is, half-way between the doses of bottled medicine. Then I remembered that plasters were good for sick people, and as there were a lot of plasters in the chest, I put six on him in different places. I meant to take them off at the end of twenty-four hours, but when I tried to get them off they wouldn’t come, so I had to leave them on, and it was about two months before he was able to get rid of them.

Mr. Crusoe was sick so long that I had to give up watching him all night; so I used to give him a double dose of medicine at bedtime, and then let him sleep the rest of the night. In spite of all my care, he didn’t seem to get any better. He was crazy all the time, and never seemed to notice that I was taking care of him. But I felt sure that the right medicine must be in that medicine-chest, and that if I stuck to it long enough I would find it. I was a little afraid, however, that he would starve to death, for he wouldn’t eat a thing except canned peaches and canned lobster.

At the end of two weeks he was so weak that he couldn’t turn himself over, and I was able to take off his lashings, for he couldn’t get out of bed alone, much less do me any harm.

Though I say it myself, I did everything I could to help him. One day I remembered that when I was in the hospital they used to read books to sick people; so I found the captain’s book on navigation, and after that I used to read to Mr. Crusoe about an hour every day. I read him all the problems in plane sailing, parallel sailing, Mercator’s sailing, and oblique sailing, and a great deal of the tables of logarithms. The tables really helped him, I think, for he sometimes went to sleep while I was reading them.

Two or three times I thought I had found the right medicine, but I always found out by giving Mr. Crusoe three or four doses of it that it didn’t fit him. Before the end of the third week all the powders, nearly all the pills, and about half of the bottled medicine was gone, and I was afraid that if he was sick much longer I would have to put him on an allowance, and only serve out half doses of medicine.

All this time I kept a bright lookout for picnickers. I fastened the ship’s ensign, union down, to the top of the big tree on the hill, and built a big bonfire on the hill ready to light as a signal to any vessel that might sight the island in the night. But no picnickers and no vessel came, though if Mr. Crusoe had let me make signals for vessels from the time we first came ashore, I am sure we should have been taken off very soon.

I was getting so anxious about Mr. Crusoe that I wanted to try everything that I could think of that might help him. I had sometimes seen a man’s arm, when he had sprained it, rubbed with medicine, and as Mr. Crusoe’s brain was all wrong, I thought that perhaps he had sprained it by thinking too hard about his grandfather. I tried rubbing his head with medicines, hoping that it might do his brain good; and as medicines can’t hurt you when they are only rubbed into you, I used to mix half a dozen medicines together and rub Mr. Crusoe’s head with the mixture. But one day I happened to rub him with a medicine that turned his hair bright blue, and then made it all fall out. Either that or some other medicine made his head very sore, so I had to give up rubbing him before it really had time to do much good.

Doctors sometimes give baths to sick people, and sometimes they even make people take hot baths. But I think that is dangerous, for I was once shipmate with a man who told me that he knew a man who got into a hot bath, and all the skin peeled off of him, and he died.

As I had tried everything else, I tried carrying Mr. Crusoe down to the lagoon and dipping him in the water. At first he didn’t like it, but after a little he quite took to it, and would let me carry him down and dip him without saying a word. For all that, it didn’t do him any good—nothing did; and though he must have taken four gallons of bottled medicine, and I don’t know how many pounds of powders, he was no better, as far as I could see, than he would have been if he hadn’t had a drop of medicine.