many alive
can testify them. His other conduct and assistance to me also
have just references in all their parts to the helps I had from
that faithful savage in my real solitudes and disasters."

It may be added that there are strong grounds for believing Defoe to
have had about this time assistance in his literary work.

All this is very neatly worked out; but of course the really important
event in Crusoe's life is his great shipwreck and his long solitude
on the island. Now of what events in Defoe's life are these
symbolical?

The 'Silence.'

Well, in the very forefront of his _Serious Reflections_, and in
connection with his long confinement in the island, Defoe makes Crusoe
tell the following story:--

"I have heard of a man that, upon some extraordinary disgust
which he took at the unsuitable conversation of some of his
nearest relations, whose society he could not avoid, suddenly
resolved never to speak any more. He kept his resolution most
rigorously many years; not all the tears or entreaties of his
friends--no, not of his wife and children--could prevail with him
to break his silence. It seems it was their ill-behaviour to him,
at first, that was the occasion of it; for they treated him with
provoking language, which frequently put him into undecent
passions, and urged him to rash replies; and he took this severe
way to punish himself for being provoked, and to punish them for
provoking him. But the severity was unjustifiable; it ruined his
family and broke up his house. His wife could not bear it, and
after endeavouring, by all the ways possible, to alter his rigid
silence, went first away from him, and afterwards from herself,
turning melancholy and distracted. His children separated, some
one way and some another way; and only one daughter, who loved
her father above all the rest, kept with him, tended him, talked
to him by signs, and lived almost dumb like her father _near
twenty-nine years with him; till being very sick, and in a high
fever, delirious as we call it, or light-headed, he broke his
silence_, not knowing when he did it, and spoke, though wildly at
first. He recovered of his illness afterwards, and frequently
talked with his daughter, but not much, and very seldom to
anybody else."

I italicise some very important words in the above story. Crusoe