Of course, the great classic of the realistic method suited for children is _Robinson Crusoe_. From the days of Rousseau who designated it as the one book to be given to his ideally educated child, teachers have appreciated its value. Indeed, a very curious, but not unnatural, thing has happened, in the fact that this book has been so long and closely associated with children that it has come to be considered a sort of nursery classic, a wonder-tale composed for infants, by hosts of people who have no idea that it is in reality a masterly realistic novel and a profoundly philosophical culture-document--an epoch-making piece of art. Fortunately, it is easy to prepare it for the children; it is largely a matter of leaving out the reflective passages, and of translating into modern English the very few phrases and turns of expression now obsolete. One would deplore the reduction of the story for any purpose to mere babble--to words of one syllable, or any other form that destroys the flavor of Defoe's convincing style. It is easy to arrange the experiences so that the story serves the purposes of a cycle--a single experience constituting a portion which may be treated as a complete thing; for example, the making of the baskets, the construction of the pots, the saving of the seed. _Robinson Crusoe_ is a treasure to many a grade teacher, because it really "correlates" beautifully with work that the children are doing, or might well be doing, in the third and fourth grades; whether in their history study, where they are devising food and shelter, or have advanced to the study of trades and crafts; or, under an entirely different scheme, have started on the study of voyagers and colonists. The art and the charm of _Robinson Crusoe_, and the secret of its literary value for the child, lie in the power of the sheer realism--a realism not so much of material as of method--to hold and convince us. A part of this realism is the richness and homeliness of detail; the painstaking record of failures and tentative achievements; the calm, judicial view of experiments; the colorless flow of long periods of time; the homely, and as it were domestic, worth of Crusoe's successes. Oh, it is a great and convincing book! How great and how convincing one may realize when he reads the only one of the innumerable "Robinsons," taking their inspiration from Defoe's book, that really survives--the _Swiss Family Robinson_, with its facile and too often fatuous ease of accomplishment, its total lack of reality, its stupid and blundering didacticism, its impossible jumble of detail, its commonplace romance; yet, we must reluctantly add, its unfailing charm for the children. That a book with all these faults keeps its hold upon the successive generations of children is testimony to the fact that its basis of interest, which is also for children the essential interest of _Robinson Crusoe_--the old foundation process of getting fire and roof and coat