The Childrens Hour, v 5 | Page 2

that it is more than the story of a man who makes a
wonderful journey. This book was written in jail by a man named John Bunyan. The
English laws of that time would not allow any one to preach except clergymen of the
Church of England. Bunyan, however, felt that it would be wicked for him to obey these
laws, so he kept on preaching. He was thrown into prison, and the prisons of those days
were horrible places. "If you will promise not to preach again, you shall be free," said the
officers. "If you let me out to-day I will preach again to-morrow," declared Bunyan; and
meanwhile he preached to the other prisoners. He thought of his wife and children and of
how little he could do to support them while he was in jail; he thought of his little blind
daughter Mary; but still he said to himself, "I must, I must do it." For twelve long years
he stayed in prison. He made tags for shoe laces to sell to help his family; and he wrote
the book that has been read by more people than any other volume except the Bible.
The second book, "Robinson Crusoe," was written by Daniel Defoe; and he, too, knew
what it was to be in jail. He was not imprisoned for preaching, but for his political
writings. Once when he had written a pamphlet that did not please the authorities, he was
condemned to stand in the pillory. The people took his part, and, instead of throwing
stones at him, they dropped roses about him and bought thousands of copies of a poem
that he had written while in jail.
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