Three Stories Read Online Free PDF

preparation.
We should make due preparation for death, or else be struck down where we stand.
As he, Robinson, was made to see when of a sudden, on his island, he came one day
upon the footprint of a man in the sand. It was a print, and therefore a sign: of
a foot, of a man. But it was a sign of much else too. You are not alone , said the
sign; and also, No matter how far you sail, no matter where you hide, you will be
searched out.
    In the year of the plague, writes his man, others, out of terror, abandoned all,
their homes, their wives and children, and fled as far from London as they could.
When the plague had passed, their flight was condemned as cowardice on all sides.
But, writes his man, we forget what kind of courage was called on to confront the
plague. It was not a mere soldier’s courage, like gripping a weapon and charging
the foe: it was like charging Death himself on his pale horse.
    Even at his best, his island parrot, the better loved of the two, spoke no word he
was not taught to speak by his master. How then has it come about that this man of
his, who is a kind of parrot and not much loved, writes as well as or better than
his master? For he wields an able pen, this man of his, no doubt of that. Like charging
Death himself on his pale horse. His own skill, learned in the counting house, was
in making tallies and accounts, not in turning phrases. Death himself on his pale
horse : those are words he would not think of. Only when he yields himself up to this
man of his do such words come.
    And decoy ducks, or duckoys: What did he, Robinson, know of decoy ducks? Nothing
at all, until this man of his began sending in reports.
    The duckoys of the Lincolnshire fens, the great engine of execution in Halifax: reports
from a great tour this man of his seems to be making of the island of Britain, which
is a figure of the tour he made of his own island in the skiff he built, the tour
that showed there was a farther side to the island, craggy and dark and inhospitable,
which he ever afterwards avoided, though if in the future colonists shall arrive
upon the island they will perhaps explore it and settle it; that too being a figure,
of the dark side of the soul and the light.
    When the first bands of plagiarists and imitators descended upon his island history and foisted on the public their own feigned stories of the castaway life, they seemed
to him no more or less than a horde of cannibals falling upon his own flesh, that
is to say, his life; and he did not scruple to say so. When I defended myself against
the cannibals, who sought to strike me down and roast me and devour me , he wrote, I thought I defended myself against the thing itself. Little did I guess , he wrote, that these cannibals were but figures of a more devilish voracity, that would gnaw
at the very substance of truth.
    But now, reflecting further, there begins to creep into his breast a touch of fellow
feeling for his imitators. For it seems to him now that there are but a handful of
stories in the world; and if the young are to be forbidden to prey upon the old then
they must sit for ever in silence.
    Thus in the narrative of his island adventures he tells of how he awoke in terror
one night convinced the devil lay upon him in his bed in the shape of a huge dog.
So he leapt to his feet and grasped a cutlass and slashed left and right to defend
himself while the poor parrot that slept by his bedside shrieked in alarm. Only many
days later did he understand that neither dog nor devil had lain upon him, but rather
that he had suffered a palsy of a passing kind, and being unable to move his leg
had concluded there was some creature stretched out upon it. Of which event the lesson
would seem to be that all afflictions, including the palsy, come from the devil and
are the very devil; that a visitation by illness may be figured as a visitation by
the devil, or by a dog figuring the devil, and vice versa, the visitation figured
as an illness, as in the