again, you shall be free," said the officers. "If you let me out
to-day I will preach again to-morrow," declared Bunyan; and meanwhile
he preached to the other prisoners. He thought of his wife and
children and of how little he could do to support them while he was in
jail; he thought of his little blind daughter Mary; but still he said
to himself, "I must, I must do it." For twelve long years he stayed in
prison. He made tags for shoe laces to sell to help his family; and he
wrote the book that has been read by more people than any other volume
except the Bible.

The second book, "Robinson Crusoe," was written by Daniel Defoe; and
he, too, knew what it was to be in jail. He was not imprisoned for
preaching, but for his political writings. Once when he had written a
pamphlet that did not please the authorities, he was condemned to
stand in the pillory. The people took his part, and, instead of
throwing stones at him, they dropped roses about him and bought
thousands of copies of a poem that he had written while in jail.

He wrote many books, but his best, "Robinson Crusoe," was produced
after he had become a middle-aged man and had some money and a big,
homely house with plenty of ground for his favorite gardening. The way
the book came to be written was this. A sailor named Alexander Selkirk
spent more than four years alone on the island of Juan Fernandez. When
he was rescued and brought to England, many people went to gaze at him
in his goatskin clothes and to hear him talk about his life on the
island. Defoe went with the others, and he never forgot the stories
told by the sailor in goatskins. Seven years later he worked in his
garden and thought about the desert island. Then he went into his
house and wrote the book that everybody likes, "Robinson Crusoe."