The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-09-09
From the Kansas City Star.


 |DsRHAUs you have laughed at Poor N Old Robinson Crusoe' in the funny \ section of a newspaper. Yes-no use denying it!-you always read the
 funnies' first. Well, that's all right If you keep right on and read something else, but you're likely to swallow so much wind with the laughs that there is no room left for things that have to be chewed and digested.
 The original Robinson is a little old fashioned, but by no means out of date. Your fathers and grandfathers and great grandfathers and great-great-grandfat CTS all read his adventures when they were boys, and I daresay got many an application of birch for neglecting the chores to follow Robinson through his exploits Five generations have wondered, when Robinson was stripped to his un- derwear to swim ashore from the wreck, where on earth Cor in the ocean for that matter) he found pockets to put the sea biscuits and tools he says he took with him.
 Your forbears knew Robinson forwards and backwards. True there were not so | I can tell you there haven't been many finer books written since. Why, it was worth a caning to go with Robinson to the top of the hill on his island and see through his spyglass the three canoe loads of cannibals. and then, still in his com pany, dash down on them at their feast, yelling like f1ends (your grandfather and Robinson), firing the old flintlocks, iourishing the sabers, rescuing Friday and scurrying back to the cave to pray that the rest of the savages would leave. Good was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven
 And then how your great-grandfather laughed at Fridays adventure with the bear in Spain, when they played hide and-seek up and down big oak! Henty and Ned Merton and Jack Harkaway are all very well, but plain old-fashioned Robinson Crusoe has more good whole some thrills as well as sound practical wisdom than whole army of such.
 When you read it, get the complete book. Don't be content with some con- densed edition that somebody thinks bet ter suited to young people. We hear about food put up in capsules these days, but people still like a beefsteak and a plate of mealy potatoes. Read it just as Defoe wrote It. and if 1t seems long. here's an easy rule: skip the uninterest- ing pages. I am confident you can count them on your fingers and toes
 If Daniel Defoe had merely written the story of his own life he could have made delightful romance. But he always preferred to make his own facts. Of man, Alexander Selkirk, who had lived three years on a desert island, and Defoe invented nearly everything in the story. He could make a fiction read more sen sible than a sober fact. He wrote a his tory of the great plague in London that many people took for an account of an actual eyewitness. and on another oc- casion he advocated hanging all people not belonging to the Church of England, and did 1t with such a sober face that the Church of England men cried "Hur- rah!-and then found to their chagrin they had been hoaxed.
 He delighted in mystifying everybody | He was what you would call shifty fel- low. AL one tlme ne was empioyeu Tn edl- ting a magazine in the interests of one political party and he was in realty work ing for the rival party by removing the sting from the paper without his em- pioyers recognizing it.
 | Defoe was also a hustler. He wrote as many volumes In his lifetime as many people read. During a term of imprison- ment for writing political pamphlet hs started the first real newspaper, com posed 1t almost altogether himself and kep it going three times week for two years. It was not until he was past 60 when most men cease from active work that he wrote Robinson Crusoe." Jus think. If Dr. Osler had had his way witl him, some grandfather would never nav, gotten himself caned, on Robinson's ac count anyway After that he wrot'
 many others. Captain Singleton" "Col