If any apology for the objects designed or the course pursued is needed, the author thinks he finds it in the precedent established by the illustrious Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., who, in the introduction to his "Tales of a Traveler," thus happily sets forth the special advantage which accrues from the proper employment of a story as a means of communicating information. "I am not," he says, "for those barefaced tales which carry their moral on their surface, staring one in the face; on the contrary, I have often hid my moral from sight, and disguised it as much as possible by sweets and spices; so that while the simple reader is listening with open mouth to a ghost or love story, he may have a bolus of sound morality popped down his throat, and be never the wiser for the fraud." Whether in "Robinson Crusoe's Money" the author shall succeed in inducing his fellow-countrymen--to whom the ordinary currency medicine is becoming distasteful--to swallow without wry faces the same dose sugar-coated, remains to be determined. Norwich, Conn., January, 1876. CONTENTS. Chapter I. Page The Three Great Bags of Money 11 Chapter II. A New Social Order of Things 13 Chapter III. The Period of Barter 15 Chapter IV. How They Invented Money 20 Chapter V. How the People on the Island and Elsewhere Learned Wisdom 26 Chapter VI. Gold, and How they Came to Use It 33 Chapter VII. How the Islanders Determined to be an Honest and Free People 50 Chapter VIII. How the People on the Island Came to Use Currency in the Place of Money 55 Chapter IX. War with the Cannibals, and What Came of It 60 Chapter X. After the War 72 Chapter XI. The New Millennium 83 Chapter XII. Getting Sober 108 ROBINSON CRUSOE'S MONEY. CHAPTER I. THE THREE GREAT BAGS OF MONEY. All who have read "Robinson Crusoe" (and who has not?) will remember the circumstance of his opening, some time after he had become domiciled on his desolate island, one of the chests that had come to him from the ship. In it he found pins, needles and thread, a pair of large scissors, "ten or a dozen good knives," some cloth, about a dozen and a half of white linen handkerchiefs concerning which he remarks, "They were exceedingly refreshing to wipe my face on a warm day;" and, finally, hidden away in the till of the chest, "three great bags of money--gold as well as silver."