passions, and urged him to rash replies; and he took this severe
way to punish himself for being provoked, and to punish them for
provoking him. But the severity was unjustifiable; it ruined his
family and broke up his house. His wife could not bear it, and
after endeavouring, by all the ways possible, to alter his rigid
silence, went first away from him, and afterwards from herself,
turning melancholy and distracted. His children separated, some
one way and some another way; and only one daughter, who loved
her father above all the rest, kept with him, tended him, talked
to him by signs, and lived almost dumb like her father _near
twenty-nine years with him; till being very sick, and in a high
fever, delirious as we call it, or light-headed, he broke his
silence_, not knowing when he did it, and spoke, though wildly at
first. He recovered of his illness afterwards, and frequently
talked with his daughter, but not much, and very seldom to
anybody else."

I italicise some very important words in the above story. Crusoe was
wrecked on his island on September 30th, 1659, his twenty-seventh
birthday. We are told that he remained on the island twenty-eight
years, two months and nineteen days. (Compare with duration of the
man's silence in the story.) This puts the date of his departure at
December 19th, 1687.

Now add twenty-seven years. We find that Defoe left _his_
solitude--whatever that may have been--on December 19th, 1714. Just at
that date, as all his biographers record, Defoe was struck down by a
fit of apoplexy and lay ill for six weeks. Compare this again with the
story.