used to live, and Kate and
Teddy Ames, who lived in the next house, used to come over and play in
the cellar with Billy and me.

Billy was my brother, eight years old, and the best fellow to play with
you ever saw, because he was always "sperimentin"--that's what mother
called it, and it meant trying to do things.

Billy knew a great deal more than all the rest of the boys in our
school, and he was very fond of reading, but it didn't make him stupid a
bit, for whatever he read about he always wanted to go right off and see
if _he_ could do it too. This made great fun for us, and got Billy into
lots of scrapes.

When he tried to do anything like what he had read about, he never would
be satisfied until he could do it all exactly as the reading said it
was. So when we had read _Robinson Crusoe_ together--I think Billy knew
it all by heart as well as he knew the table of sevens in the
multiplication table--he said, "Now let's play _Robinson Crusoe_." First
he called the old open cellar Crusoe's cave, and scooped out a place
between some stones and made it clean, and I braided a little mat and a
curtain out of some long grass for it, and there he put his old copy of
_Robinson Crusoe_, and for days and days, after school was out, and in
vacation, we played _Robinson Crusoe_ together.

Kate was a parrot, and wanted a great deal of cracker, Teddy was a goat,
and I was the dog and "man Friday" by turns. We walked about in the
cellar pretending to look for the print of naked feet, Billy going in
front carrying a rusty old broken musket we had found in the garret, and
a piece of rubber hose (Billy always could find or make anything we
wanted) for a telescope, which he used to look through to see if there
were any savages in sight when he climbed up to the edge of the cellar.

The cellar was really an island, just like Robinson Crusoe's; for Billy
and Teddy had digged a ditch all round it, and filled it with water; but
it was a very trying sort of an ocean, 'cause we had to fill it up every
morning.

[Illustration: BILLY WATCHING FOR SAVAGES.--DRAWN BY C. S. REINHART.]

Teddy, who could whittle nicely, made some little canoes, and when Billy
was looking through the hose for savages, it was Teddy's part to poke
the canoes with a long stick like a fish-pole, so they would float right
in front of Billy's hose. Then Billy would scramble down the wall, and
come running to us 'round behind the chimney, and tell us to lie very
s