place, and kept my anniversary with the same devotion, and with as much comfort as before; for, by a constant study and serious application to the word of God, and by the assistance of his grace, I gained a different knowledge from what I had before; I entertained different notions of things; I looked now upon the world as a thing remote, which I had nothing to do with, no expectation from, and, indeed, no desires about: in a word, I had nothing to do with it, nor was ever likely to have; I thought it looked, as we may perhaps look upon it hereafter, viz. as a place I had lived in, but was come out of it; and well might I say, as father Abraham to Dives, "Between me and thee is a great gulf fixed."

In the first place, I was here removed from all the wicked ness of the world; I had neither the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, nor the pride of life. I had nothing to covet, for I had all that I was now capable of enjoying: I was lord of the whole manor; or, if I pleased, I might call myself king or emperor over the whole country which I had possession of; there were no rivals; I had no competitor, none to dispute sove. reignty or command with me: I might have raised ship-loadings of corn, but I had no use for it; so I let as little grow as I thought enough for my occasion. I had tortoise or turtle enough, but now and then one was as much as I could put to any use: I had timber enough to have built a fleet of ships and I had grapes enough to have made wine, or to have cured into raisins, to have loaded that fleet when it had been built.

But all I could make use of was all that was valuable: I had enough to eat and supply my wants, and what was the rest to me? If I killed more flesh than I could eat, the dog must eat it, or vermin; if I sowed more corn than I could eat, it must be spoiled; the trees that I cut down were lying to rot on the ground I could make no more use of them than for fuel, and that I had no other occasion for but to dress my food.

In a word, the nature and experience of things dictated to me, upon just reflection, that all the good things of this world are of no further good to us than for our use; and that whatever we may heap up to give others, we enjoy only as much as we can use, and no more. The most covetous griping niser in the world would have been cured of the vice of covet>usness, if he had been in my case; for I possessed infinitely more than I knew what to do with. I had no room for desire except it was for things which I had not, and they were com paratively but trifles, though indeed of great use to me. I had, as I hinted before, a parcel of money, as well gold as silver, about thirty-six pounds sterling. Alas! there the nasty, sorry, useless stuff lay: I had no manner of business for it; and I often thought within myself, that I would have given a handful of it for a gross of tobacco-pipes, or for a hand-mill to grind my corn; nay, I would have given it all for sixpennv-worth of tur

nip and carrot seed from England, or for a handful of peas and beans, and a bottle of ink. As it was, I had not the least ad vantage by it, or benefit from it; but there it lay in a drawer, and grew mouldy with the damp of the cave in the wet seasons; and if I had had the drawer full of diamonds, it had been the same case,-they had been of no manner of value to me, because of no use.

I had now brought my state of life to be much more comfortable in itself than it was at first, and much easier to my mind, as well as to my body. I frequently sat down to mea with thankfulness, and admired the hand of God's providence, which had thus spread my table in the wilderness; I learned to look more upon the bright side of my condition, and less upon the dark side, and to consider what I enjoyed, rather than what I wanted; and this gave me sometimes such secre comforts, that I cannot express them; and which I take notice of here, to put those discontented people in mind of it, who cannot enjoy comfortably what God has given them, because they see and covet something that he has not given them. All our discontents about what we want, appeared to me to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.

Another reflection was of great use to me, and doubtless would be so to any one that should fall into such distress as mine was; and this was, to compare my present condition with what I at first expected it would be; nay, with what it

would certainly have been, if the good providence of God nad not wonderfully ordered the ship to be cast up near to the shore, where I not only could come at her, but could bring what I got out of her to the shore, for my relief and comfort; without which, I had wanted for tools to work, weapons for defence, and gunpowder and shot for getting my food.

I spent whole hours, I may say whole days, in representing o myself, in the most lively colors, how I must have acted if had got nothing out of the ship. I could not have so much s got any food, except fisn and turtles; and that, as it was ong before I found any of them, I must have perished; that I should have lived, if I had not perished, like a mere savage; that if I had killed a goat or a fowl, by any contrivance, I had no way to flay or open it, or part the flesh from the skin and the bowels, or to cut it up; but must gnaw it with my teeth, and pull it with my claws, like a beast.

These reflections made me very sensible of the goodness of Providence to me, and very thankful for my present condition, with all its hardships and misfortunes; and this part also I cannot but recommend to the reflection of those who are apt, in their misery, to say, Is any affliction like mine? Let them consider how much worse the cases of some people are, and their case might have been, if Providence had thought fit.

I had another reflection, which assisted me also to comfort my mind with hopes; and this was, comparing my present condition with what I had deserved, and had therefore reason to expect from the hand of Providence. I had lived a dreadful life, perfectly destitute of the knowledge and fear of God. I had been well instructed by my father and mother; neither had they been wanting to me, in their endeavors to infuse an early religious awe of God into my mind, a sense of my duty, and what the nature and end of my being required of me. But, alas! falling early into the seafaring life, which, of all lives, is the most destitute of the fear of God, though his terrors are dways before them; I say, falling early into the seafaring life, and into seafaring company, all that little sense of religion which I had entertained was laughed out of me by my mess mates, by a hardened despising of dangers, and the views of death, which grew habitual to me; by my long absence from all manner of opportunities to converse with any thing_but what was like myself, or to hear any thing that was good, or ending towards it.

So void was I of every thing that was good, or of the least sense of what I was, or was to be, that in the greatest deliverances I enjoyed (such as my escape from Sallee, my being taken up by the Portuguese master of a ship, my being planted so well in the Brazils, my receiving the cargo from England, and the like), I never had once the words, Thank God so much as on my mind, or in my mouth; nor in the

greatest distress had I so much as a thought to pray to him, or so much as to say, Lord, have mercy upon me! no, nor to mention the name of God, unless it was to swear by, and blas pheme it.

I had terrible reflections upon my mind for many months, as I have already observed, on account of my wicked and hardened life past; and when I looked about me, and considered what particular providences had attended me since my coming into this place, and how God had dealt bountifully with me,-had not only punished me less than my iniquity had deserved, but had so plentifully provided for me, this gave me great hopes that my repentance was accepted, and that God had yet mercies in store for me.

With these reflections, I worked my mind up, not only to a resignation to the will of God in the present disposition of my circumstances, but even to a sincere thankfulness for my condition; and that I, who was yet a living man, ought not to complain, seeing I had not the due punishment of my sins; that I enjoyed so many mercies which I had no reason to have expected in that place, that I ought never more to repine at my condition, but to rejoice, and to give daily thanks for that daily bread which nothing but a crowd of wonders could have brought; that I ought to consider I had been fed by a miracle, even as great as that of feeding Elijah by ravens; nay, by a long series of miracles; and that I could hardly have named a place in the uninhabitable part of the world where I could have been cast more to my advantage; a place where, as I had no society, which was my affliction on one hand, so I found no ravenous beasts, no furious wolves or tigers, to threaten my life; no venomous or poisonous creatures which I might feed on to my hurt; no savages to murder and devour me. In a word, as my life was a life of sorrow one way, so it was a life of mercy another; and I wanted nothing to make it a life of comfort, but to make myself sensible of God's goodness to me, and care over me in this condition; and after I did make a just improvement of these things, I went away, and was no more sad.

I had now been here so long, that many things which 1 brought on shore for my help were either quite gone, or very much wasted, and near spent.

My ink, as I observed, had been gone for some time, all bu a very little, which I eked out with water, a little and a little till it was so pale, it scarce left any appearance of black upon the paper. As long as it lasted, I made use of it to minute down the days of the month on which any remarkable thing happened to me; and, first, by casting up times past, I remember that there was a strange concurrence of days in the various providences which befell me, and which, if I had been superstitiously inclined to observe days as fatal or fortunate, I might have had reason to have looked upon with a great dea

al curiosity

First, I had observed, that the same day that I broke away from my father and iny friends, and ran away to Hull, in order to go to sea, the same day afterwards I was taken by the Sallee man-of-war, and made a slave: the same day of the year that I escaped out of the wreck of the ship in Yarmouth Roads, that same day-year afterwards I made my escape from Sallee in the boat; and the same day of the year I was born on, viz. the 30th of September, that same day I had my life so miracu lously saved twenty-six years after, when I was cast on shore in this island: so that my wicked life and my solitary life be gan both on one day.

The next thing to my ink being wasted, was that of my bread; I mean the biscuit which I brought out of the ship: this I had husbanded to the last degree, allowing myself but one cake of bread a day for above a year; and yet I was quite without bread for near a year before I got any corn of my own; and great reason I had to be thankful that I had any at all, the getting it, being, as has been already observed, next to miraculous.

My clothes, too, began to decay mightily: as to linen, I had none for a great while, except some checkered shirts, which 1 found in the chests of the other seamen, and which I carefully preserved, because many times I could bear no clothes on but a shirt; and it was a very great help to me, that I had, among all the men's clothes of the ship, almost three dozen of shirts. There were also, indeed, several thick watch-coats of the seamen's which were left, but they were too hot to wear; and though it is true that the weather was so violently hot that there was no need of clothes, yet I could not go quite naked; no, though I had been inclined to it, which I was not; nor could I abide the thought of it, though I was all alone. The reason why I could not go quite naked, was, I could not bear the heat of the sun so well when quite naked as with some clothes on; nay, the very heat frequently blistered my skin whereas, with a shirt on, the air itself made some motion, and whistling under the shirt, was twofold cooler than without it. No more could I ever bring myself to go out in the heat of the sun without a cap or hat; the heat of the sun beating with Buch violence as it does in that place, would give me the headache presently, by darting so directly upon my head, withou a cap or hat on, so that I could not bear it; whereas, if I put o my hat, it would presently go away.

Upon these views, I began to consider about putting the few rags I had, which I called clothes, into some order : I had worn out all the waistcoats I had, and my business was now to try if I could not make jackets out of the great watch-coats that I had by me, and with such other materials as I had; so I set to work a tailoring, or rather, indeed, a botching, for I