“Then, sir,” said I, “if you please, you’ll kindly let me say that the Robinson Crusoe you used to talk about must have been the worst old idiot that ever lived, and if I had only known that he wasn’t your grandfather I’d have taken you away from here months ago.”
“How long have we been here?” asked Mr. Monroe.
“Well, sir, you used to keep a sort of log by making scratches on a post, and according to that we’ve been here about two hundred and fifteen years. According to my reckoning we’ve been here about a year and two months.”
“And in all that time you haven’t seen a soul except one crazy man?”
“Oh yes,” said I, “there were a lot of Sunday-school picnickers came here about a month ago, but they didn’t see us. You said they were cannibals, and you wanted to shoot them.”
“I must have been a nice person,” said he, laughing. “But what I want to do now is to get strong. I suppose you haven’t any milk here?”
“There are the goats. If you like goat’s milk, you can have all you want of it.”
So I fed him on goat’s milk for a week, and by the end of that time he was stronger than Mr. Crusoe ever was.
He was a great deal nicer than Mr. Crusoe, and whenever I told him what Mr. Crusoe used to do he would laugh himself nearly sick. The goat-skin clothes amused him more than anything else, though he hated them as much as I did.
He didn’t remember the least thing about his having been at sea. He said that the last thing he could remember was being in his house in New York, and having two doctors come to see him. When I described the man that was with him on board the ship he could not tell who he was, but rather thought he must have been a hired nurse. It was Mr. Monroe’s opinion that his doctors must have told him to take a sea-voyage, and that he must have become crazy soon after the ship sailed.