any
material accessible for the ends of instruction.

The text as here given has been published with an introduction and
suggestive treatments as a Teacher's Manual for Primary Grades--"The
Teacher's Robinson Crusoe." Explicit directions and ample suggestions
are made for the use of the story as material for instruction in all the
language arts, drawing, social history, and the manual arts.

Published by the Educational Publishing Company.

AN AMERICAN
ROBINSON CRUSOE

I

ROBINSON WITH HIS PARENTS

There once lived in the city of New York, a boy by the name of Robinson
Crusoe. He had a pleasant home. His father and mother were kind to him
and sent him to school. They hoped that he would study hard and grow up
to be a wise and useful man, but he loved rather to run idle about the
street than to go to school. He was fond of playing along the River
Hudson, for he there saw the great ships come and go. They were as big
as houses. He watched them load and unload their cargoes and hundreds of
people get off and on. His father had told him that the ships came from
far distant lands, where lived many large animals and black men. His
father told him too, that in these faraway countries the nuts on the
trees grew to be as large as one's head and that the tree were as high
as church steeples.

When Robinson saw the ships put out to sea he would watch them till they
would disappear below the horizon far out in the ocean, and think, "Oh,
if I could only go with them far away to see those strange countries!"
Thus he would linger along the great river and wish he might find an
opportunity of making a voyage. Often it would be dark before he would
get home. When he came into the house his mother would meet him and say
in a gentle voice, "Why, Robinson, how late you are in getting home! You
have been to the river again."

[Illustration: ROBINSON WATCHING THE SHIPS]

Then Robinson would hang his head and feel deeply ashamed, and when his
father, who was a merchant, came home from the store, his mother would
tell him that Robinson had again been truant.

This would grieve his father deeply and he would go to the boy's bedside
and talk earnestly with him. "Why do you do so?" he would say. "How
often have I told you to go to school every day?" This would for a time
win Robinson back to school, but by the next week it had been forgotten
and he would again be loitering along the river in spite of his father