The Andrew County Republican. [volume] (Savannah, Mo.) 1871-1876, 1874-09-11

| ever were written-Robinson Crusoei
To be sure, he had not written "Rob-
inson Crusoe" at that time ; if he had,
| perhaps the sheriff, or whoever sent out
the proclamation, would have described
him as the writer of a story-book about
being cast away on a desert island, and
full of monstrous fables, instead of de-
scribing him as a hosier of Freeman's
court. But l don't know. People in
authority never know or care so much
about the books q man writes, as about
the shop he keeps and the debts he
owes.
But did they catch the hook-nosed
man and did somebody get the fifty
pounds?
Yes, they caught him; and yes, too,
about the pounds.
And he had an awful time in prison,
he tells us, and chafed horribly ; for he
was one of those restless, impatient,
busy-bodies, who want always to be at
work, and at work in their own way.
He was what would have been called, I
dare say, a hot-headed radical and if
he had been born a century and n half
later, would have made Il capital edi-
torial writer for a slashing morning
journal in such a city as New York or
Washington. But Dur people in au-
thority would not have offered a reward
for his arrest; they would have shrug-
ged their shoulders, or, failing of this,
would have given him an Office.
Yet, for all his political sharpness,
this hook-nosed man had an eve for
business. He had established some
tile-works at Tilbury, where were made,
for the first time in England, those
qneer-shaped Dutch tiles for roofing,
which-if you ever so there-you will
see on n great many of the houses of
Rotterdam and Amsterdam; and some
of them are yet to be seen upon old
houses in Charleston, in South Caro-
lima. 1t is true that he ran heavily into
debt with his tile-making, and was
forced to suspend Gas we say now; but
he got fairly upon his feet again, and
had paid up lis old debts, and was at
his tile-making as before, when he was
swooped into prison.
He had all the more enemies because
he had been befriended by King
William (who died in 1902, and who
was a stanch Protestant, and-as you
knov-had come over from Holland TO
take the English throne. Defoe was a
stanch Protestant, too, and a very hot
headed one. And it was his sharp talk
about religious matters-which were
then closely mixed up with political
ones-which brought him to grief.
But he kept on writing. The prison
couldn't stop that, or it didn't. And
when at last he came ont, he wrote all
the more. He was a born writer, and
never grew weary of writing. Yet It
fully seventeen years after the offer
Of that ffty-pound reward, and when
the "forty-year-old, h~ook-nosed man"
was well OF towards sixty, that he pub
iished 1.-THE Life and Strange, Sur
prising Adventures of Robinson Cru
soc, Of York. Mariner, who lived
Eight-and-twenty Years, all alone, in
an Uninhabited Island on the Coast of
America, near the Mouth of the great
River Oroonoque."
All, what a book it wac, What a
book il is !
You don't ever know the names of
those political booklets which this man
wrote, and which made him O good
friend of the great King William. and
gave him great fame, and brought him
to prison; nor do you know, nor do your
fathers or mothers know, much about
those other books which this mar wrote
upontrade, and religious courtship anda
score of other things nor are they by
any body much read recalled for. But as
for that dear old figure in tn high goat
skin cap, and with the umbrella to
match, and the long beai who does
not know him, and all a 1ut him, all
over the Christian world?
Why, long as it is since first trem-
bled over the sight OF those savage foot
marks in the sand, and slept the cave,
and pulled up the rope-ladder that hung
down over the palisades-yet if that
dear old figure in the high goat-skin cap
and the goat-skin leggings were to