EVIL | GOOD -------------------------------------------------- I have no clothes to | But I am in a hot climate, cover me. | where, if I had | clothes (!) I could hardly | wear them. On page 147, bewailing his lack of a sieve, he says: “Linen, I had none but what was mere rags.” Page 158 (one year later): “My clothes, too, began to decay; as to linen, I had had none a good while, except some checkered shirts, which I carefully preserved, because many times I could bear no other clothes on. I had almost three dozen of shirts, several thick watch coats, too hot to wear.” So he tried to make jackets out of the watch coats. Then this ingenious gentleman, who had nothing to wear and was glad of it on account of the heat, which kept him from wearing anything but a shirt, and rendered watch coats unendurable, actually made himself a coat, waistcoat, breeches, cap and umbrella of skins with the hair on and wore them in great comfort! Page 175 he goes hunting, wearing this suit, belted by two heavy skin belts, carrying hatchet, saw, powder, shot, his heavy fowling piece and the goatskin umbrella--total weight of baggage and clothes about ninety pounds. It must have been a cold day! Yet the first thing he does for the naked Friday thirteen years later is to give him a pair--of--LINEN--trousers! Poor Robin Crusoe--what a colossal liar was wasted on a desert island! * * * * * Of course, no boy sees the blemishes in “Robinson Crusoe;” those are left to the Infallible Critic. The book is as ludicrous as “Hamlet” from one aspect and as profound as “Don Quixote” from another. In its pages the wonder tales and wonder facts meet and resolve; realism and idealism are joined--above all, there is a mystery no critic may solve. It is useless to criticize genius or a miracle, except to increase its wonder. Who remembers anything in “Crusoe” but the touch of the wizard's hand? Who associates the Duke of Athens, Hermia and Helena, with Bottom and Snug, Titania, Oberon and Puck? Any literary master mechanic might real off ten thousand yards of the Greek folks or of “Pericles,” but when you want something that runs thus: “I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows! Where oxlip and the nodding violet grows--.” why, then, my masters, you must put up the price and employ a genius to work the miracle. Take all miracles without question. Whether work of genius or miracle of accident, “Robinson Crusoe” gives you a generous run for your money. V. THE OPEN POLAR SEA OF NOVELS WITH HIGHLY INCENDIARY ADVICE TO BOYS AND SOME MORE ANCIENT HISTORY