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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 trees 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's remonstrances.
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Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
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