"No, sir," said I. "The last time I read it was less than one year ago, and I found it as fresh and entertaining as ever." "No doubt of it," replied Father Grafton. "Nothing connected with my schoolboy days has so firmly stamped itself on my memory as the appearance of the old copy of Crusoe, that I owned for many years; indeed, I carried it to sea with me on my first voyage, and it was accidentally lost overboard. I can see the brown paper and the quaint old type with its _f_ and long _s_ so dangerously alike, and its horrible woodcuts! for it was a copy of a very old edition, and had, no doubt, delighted two or three generations of boys before it fell into my hands. But what reminded me of it to-night is the fact that we shall probably make Juan Fernandez to-morrow." "Yet this island is not mentioned in the story, I believe," said I. "No, the scene of the romance lies on the Atlantic side, somewhere near the mouth of the Orinoco; but it is probable that De Foe got the idea from the story of a Scotchman who lived three years on this island." "O yes," said I, "I remember the soliloquy of this Selkirk that I used to read and declaim at the country school, "'I am Monarch of all I survey.' Then I suppose this Selkirk story is really true, is it?" "Yes, there is no good reason to doubt it. He was taken off the island by the English circumnavigator, Rogers, in 1709, if I remember right." "Is there any one living on it now?" I asked. "I don't know. There was no one there the last visit I made to it. But I have heard since that the Chilian government made use of it as a penal settlement, or something of the kind. But we shall not probably land there. What we want is a good haul of fresh fish, and this is just the place to find it. We must muster all the fishing-lines in the ship; the old man has got plenty of hooks; and, by the way, I want you in the morning to get an iron hoop from the cooper and net it across with ropeyarn ('Cooper' will know just what I want), to catch some crawfish." "What sort of fish are they?" asked I. "Why, they are a species of the lobster family, and fully equal to any of our lobsters in flavor." "Juan Fernandez," resumed the mate, "is a name that more correctly belongs to both islands, some seventy or eighty miles apart. The Spaniards called them _Mas a tierra_ and _Mas a fuera_, from their relative positions, 'more inshore,' and 'more off-shore.' The westernmost is still known by its name of Masa fuera, but this one seems to have taken 'Juan Fernandez' as its distinctive title."