Page:Traits and Trials.pdf/300

294 painful, but one long weary morning when the severity of illness had softened into that languor which needs some quiet amusement, I opened its pages. It was an epoch in my life, it is an epoch in every child's life, the first reading of Robinson Crusoe. What entire possession it took of my imagination. Henceforth one half of my time was past on that lovely and lonely island. The only thing that I could not understand were Robinson Crusoe's lamentations over his solitude, to me the most unreasonable things in the world. How little did I share his joy when the English vessel came and bore him once more over the sea to his native England. It was a long time before I had any wish to read the rest. For weeks after reading that book, I lived as if in a dream, indeed I rarely dreamt of anything else at night, I went to sleep with the cave, its parrots and goats, floating before my closed eyes; I wakened in some rapid flight from the savages landing in their canoes. The elms in our own hedges were not more familiar than the prickly shrubs which