a novel. Nothing but the primitive problems of courage meeting peril,
virtue meeting vice, love, hatred, ambition for power and glory, will
go down with him. The grown man is more capable of dealing with social
subtleties and the problems of conscience, but those sorts of books do
not last unless they have also "action--action--action."

Will the New Zealander, sitting amidst the prophetic ruins of St.
Paul's, invite his soul reading Robert Elsmere? Of course you can't say
what a New Zealander of that period might actually do; but what would
you think of him if you caught him at it? The greatest stories of the
world are the Bible stories, and I never saw a boy--intractable of
acquiring the Sunday-school habit though he may have been--who wouldn't
lay his savage head on his paws and quietly listen to the good old tales
of wonder out of that book of treasures.

* * * * *

So let us look into the interior of our faithful old friend, Robinson
Crusoe, and examine his composition as a literary whole. From the moment
that Crusoe is washed ashore on the island until after the release of
Friday's father and the Spaniard from the hands of the cannibals, there
is no book in print, perhaps, that can surpass it in interest and the
strained impression it makes upon the unsophisticated mind. It is all
comprised in about 200 pages, but to a boy to whom the world is a
theater of crowded action, to whom everything seems to have come
ready-made, to whom the necessity of obedience and accommodation to
others has been conveyed by constant friction--here he finds himself
for the first time face to face with the problem of solitude. He can
appreciate the danger from wild animals, genii, ghosts, battles, sieges
and sudden death, but in no other book before, did he ever come upon a