"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