, I would
oblige the world by putting it in paper, and making it public. My
answer was that I thought we were already overstocked with books of
travels; that nothing could now pass which was not extraordinary;
wherein I doubted some authors less consulted truth than their own
vanity, or interest, or the diversion of ignorant readers; that my
story could contain little besides common events, without those
ornamental descriptions of strange plants, trees, birds, and other
animals, or of the barbarous customs and idolatry of savage people,
with which most writers abound. However, I thanked him for his good
opinion, and promised to take the matter into my thoughts.

He said he wondered at one thing very much, which was to hear me speak
so loud; asking me whether the king or queen of that country were
thick of hearing. I told him it was what I had been used to for above
two years past, and that I admired as much at the voices of him and
his men, who seemed to me only to whisper, and yet I could hear them
well enough. But, when I spoke in that country, it was like a man
talking in the street to another looking out from the top of a
steeple, unless when I was placed on a table, or held in any person's
hand. I told him I had likewise observed another thing, that when I
first got into the ship, and the sailors stood all about me, I thought
they were the most little, contemptible creatures I had ever beheld.
For, indeed, while I was in that prince's country, I could never
endure to look in a glass after mine eyes had been accustomed to such
prodigious objects, because the comparison gave me so despicable a
conceit of myself. The captain said that while we were at supper he
observed me to look at everything with a sort of wonder, and that I
often seemed hardly able to contain my laughter, which he knew not
well how to take, but imputed it to some disorder in my brain. I
answered it was very true; and I wondered how I could forbear, when I
saw his dishes of the size of a silver three-pence, a leg of pork
hardly a mouthful, a cup not so big as a nutshell; and so I went on,
describing the rest of his household stuff and provisions after the
same manner. For, although the queen had ordered a little equipage of
all things necessary while I was in her service, yet my ideas were
wholly taken up with what I saw on every side of me, and I winked at
my own littleness as people do at their own faults. The captain
understood my raillery very