goats, kids and all; and in two years after, they amounted
to forty-three, besides what I had taken and killed for my sustenance.
After which I inclosed five several pieces of ground to feed them in,
with pens to drive them into, that I might take them as I had occasion.

In this project I likewise found additional blessings; for I not only
had plenty of goat's flesh, but milk too, which in my beginning I did
not so much as think of. And, indeed, though I had never milked a cow,
much less a goat, or seen butter or cheese made, yet, after some essays
and miscarriages, I made the both, and never afterwards wanted.

How mercifully can the omnipotent Power comfort his creatures, even in
the midst of their greatest calamities? How can be sweeten the bitterest
providences, and give us reason to magnify him in dungeons and prisons?
what a bounteous table was here spread in a wilderness for me, where I
expected nothing thing at first but to perish for hunger.

Certainly a Stoic would have smiled to see me at dinner. There sat my
royal majesty, and absolute prince and ruler of my kingdom, attended by
my dutiful subjects, whom, if I pleased, I could either hang, draw,
quarter, give them liberty, or take it away. When I dined, I seemed a
king eating alone, none daring to presume to do so till I had done.
_Poll_, as if he had been my principal court favorite, was the only
person, permitted to talk with me. My old but faithful dog, now grown
exceedingly crazy, and who had no species to multiply his kind upon,
continually sat on my right hand; while my two cats sat on each side of
the table, expecting a bit from my hand, as a principal mark of my royal
favour. These were not the cats I had brought from the ship; they had
been dead long before, and interred near my habitation by mine own hand.
But one of them, as I suppose, generating with a wild cat, a couple of
their young I had made tame; the rest ran wild into the woods, and in
time grew so impudent as to return and plunder me of my stores, till
such time as I shot a great many, and the rest left me without troubling
me any more. In this plentiful manner did I live, wanting for nothing
but conversation. One thing indeed concerned me, the want of my boat; I
knew not which way to get her round the island. One time I resolved to
go along the shore by land to her; but had any one in England met such a
figure, it would either have affrighted them, or made them burst into
laughter; na