I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of

that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. He
got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at
York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named
Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom I was called
Robinson Kreutznaer; but, by the usual corruption of words in England, we are
now called - nay we call ourselves and write our name - Crusoe; and so my
companions always called me.

I had two elder brothers, one of whom was lieutenant-colonel to an English

regiment of foot in Flanders, formerly commanded by the famous Colonel
Lockhart, and was killed at the battle near Dunkirk against the Spaniards. What
became of my second brother I never knew, any more than my father or mother
knew what became of me.

Being the third son of the family and not bred to any trade, my head began to be
filled very early with rambling thoughts. My father, who was very ancient, had
given me a competent share of learning, as far as house-education and a country
free school generally go, and designed me for the law; but I would be satisfied
with nothing but going to sea; and my inclination to this led me so strongly
against the will, nay, the commands of my father, and against all the entreaties
and persuasions of my mother and other friends, that there seemed to be
something fatal in that propensity of nature, tending directly to the life of misery
which was to befall me.

My father, a wise and grave man, gave me serious and excellent counsel against
what he foresaw was my design. He called me one morning into his chamber,
where he was confined by the gout, and expostulated very warmly with me upon
this subject. He asked me what reasons, more than a mere wandering inclination,
I had for leaving father's house and my native country, where I might be well
introduced, and had a prospect of raising my fortune by application and industry,
with a life of ease and pleasure. He told me it was men of desperate fortunes on
one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who went abroad upon
adventures, to rise by enterprise, and make themselves famous in undertakings of
a nature out of the common road; that these things were all either too far above
me or too far below me; that mine was the middle state, or what might be called
the upper station of low life, which he had found, by long experience, was the
best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the
miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanic part of
mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the
upper part of mankind. He told me I might judge of the happiness of this state by
this one thing - viz. that this was the state of life which all other people envied;
that kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequence of being born to
great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes,
between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this, as
the standard of felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty nor riches.

Contesta las siguientes preguntas de comprensin

Choose the best answer, a), b) or c)

1. Robinson Crusoe got his name from a mixture of

2. Robinson Crusoe had two brothers who

3. When Crusoe's father learned that he wanted to travel and see the world he

4. Crusoes father thought that it was better to

5. Robinson Crusoes father

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness
they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest
practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another
portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule it may safely be
assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house
somewhere in the Vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out
the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which
subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old
churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is that, some fifteen or twenty years after
the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-
stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-
browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door
looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains
to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice,
and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much
overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation,
which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the
black flower of civilised society, a prison. But on one side of the portal, and
rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-hush, covered, in this month of
June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and
fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he
came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be
kind to him.

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it
had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the
gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it, or whether, as there is far
authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann
Hutchinson as she entered the prison-door, we shall not take upon us to
determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now
about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than
pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to
symbolise some sweet moral blossom that may be found along the track, or
relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.

Contesta las siguientes preguntas de comprensin

Choose the best answer, a), b) or c)

1. When humans decide to live and settle down in a new place, two of the first things they
usually create are

2. Alternative words for church, grave and prison in the text are

3. Would you describe the description of the front of the prison as being
generally
4. An attractive thing at the entrance to the prison is

5. Who takes one of the flowers and presents it to the reader?