e for provision; for I had little or nothing within doors but
some barley-cakes and water. Then I knew that my goats wanted to be
milked too, which usually was my evening diversion; and the poor
creatures were in great pain and inconvenience for want of it; and,
indeed, it almost spoiled some of them, and almost dried up their
milk.

Heartening myself, therefore, with the belief that this was nothing
but the print of one of my own feet, and so I might be truly said to
start at my own shadow, I began to go abroad again, and went to my
country house to milk my flock. But to see with what fear I went
forward, how often I looked behind me, how I was ready, every now and
then, to lay down my basket, and run for my life, it would have made
any one have thought I was haunted with an evil conscience, or that I
had been lately most terribly frighted; and so, indeed, I had.

However, as I went down thus two or three days, and having seen
nothing, I began to be a little bolder, and to think there was really
nothing in it but my own imagination. But I could not persuade myself
fully of this till I should go down to the shore again, and see this
print of a foot, and measure it by my own, and see if there was any
similitude or fitness, that I might be assured it was my own foot. But
when I came to the place, first, it appeared evidently to me that when
I laid up my boat, I could not possibly be on shore anywhere
thereabout; secondly, when I came to measure the mark with my own
foot, I found my foot not so large by a great deal. Both these things
filled my head with new imaginations, and gave me the vapors again to
the highest degree; so that I shook with cold, like one in an ague;
and I went home again, filled with the belief that some man or men had
been on shore there; or, in short, that the island was inhabited, and
I might be surprised before I was aware. And what course to take for
my security, I knew not.

Oh, what ridiculous resolution men take when possessed with fear! It
deprives them of the use of those means which reason offers for their
relief. The first thing I proposed to myself was to throw down my
enclosures, and turn all my tame cattle wild into the woods, that the
enemy might not find them, and then frequent the island in prospect of
the same or the like booty; then to the simple thing of digging up my
two corn-fields, that they might not find such a grain there, and
still be prompted to frequent the island; then