He wrote many books, but his best, “Robinson Crusoe,” was produced after he had become a middle-aged man and had some money and a big, homely house with plenty of ground for his favorite gardening.  The way the book came to be written was this.  A sailor named Alexander Selkirk spent more than four years alone on the island of Juan Fernandez.  When he was rescued and brought to England, many people went to gaze at him in his goatskin clothes and to hear him talk about his life on the island.  Defoe went with the others, and he never forgot the stories told by the sailor in goatskins.  Seven years later he worked in his garden and thought about the desert island.  Then he went into his house and wrote the book that everybody likes, “Robinson Crusoe.”

“Gulliver’s Travels” was written by an Irish clergyman named Jonathan Swift.  He was a strange man.  Some people said he was a genius, and some said he had always been a little insane.  When he wrote, he often seemed to care for nothing but to say the most cutting, scornful things that he could.  There was one class of persons, however, who loved him from the bottom of their hearts, and they were the poor people about his home in Ireland.  It is true that he sometimes scolded them, but they saw straight through his grumbling and understood that he really cared for them and wanted to help them, and they loved him and trusted him.  He lived more than two hundred years ago, but the Irish have never forgotten him; and even to this day, if you should wander about in Ireland, you would see in many a little cottage people gathered around the fire, telling over and over the stories that their grandmothers had told them of his kind heart and his peculiar ways.

“The Pilgrim’s Progress,” “Robinson Crusoe,” and “Gulliver’s Travels” were all written by men of the British Isles, but our fourth book, “Don Quixote,” was written by a Spaniard named Cervantes.  He was a soldier part of his life and as valiant a fighter as his own hero.  For five years he was a prisoner of war; he was poor and sick and in one trouble after another; but he was always brave and cheerful and good-humored.  In his day, the Spaniards read few books except queer old romances of chivalry, the sort of tale in which a great champion goes out with his squire to wander over the world in search of adventures.  He makes thieves give back what they have stolen, he sets prisoners free, he rescues beautiful maidens who have been dragged away from their homes; in short, he roams about making people do whatever he thinks proper.  Sometimes he takes a castle all by himself, sometimes he gets the better of a whole group of champions or a host of giants or even a dragon or two.  Cervantes’s book makes fun of such tales as these.  His hero attacks a terrible company of giants standing on a plain all ready to destroy him; but the giants prove to be windmills, and their sails give him many a heavy blow before his fight with them is over.  Another time, he finds the giants in his very bedroom; and the courageous knight cuts off their heads as fast as he can swing his sword.  Blood flows like water; only when a light is brought, it does not prove to be blood but—­well, it is not fair to tell the rest of the story.  We must let Cervantes do that for himself in “Don Quixote’s Battle with the Giants.”