pieces in a heavy sea upon the ice if she
did not liberate herself. But though this excited a depression
melancholy enough, nothing else that I can recollect contributed to it.
When I reviewed the apprehension the Frenchman had raised, and reflected
how unsupportable a burden he must have become, I was very well
satisfied to be alone. Time had fortified me; I had passed through
experiences so surprising, encountered wonders so preternatural, that
superstition lay asleep in my soul, and I found nothing to occasion in
me the least uneasiness in thinking of the lifeless shrivelled figure of
what was just now a fierce, cowardly, untamed villain, lying in the
forecastle.

I made a good supper, built up a large fire, and mixed myself a hearty
bowl of punch, not with the view of drowning my anxieties--God forbid! I
was too grateful for the past, too expectant of the future, to be
capable of so brutish a folly--but that I might keep myself in a
cheerful posture of mind; and being sick of my own company took the
lanthorn to the cabin lately used by the Frenchman, and found in a chest
there, among sundry articles of attire, a little parcel of books, some
in Dutch and Portuguese, and one in English.

It was a little old volume, the author's name not given, and proved to
be a relation of the writer's being taken by pirates, and the many
dangers he underwent. There was nothing in it, to be sure, that answered
to my own case, yet it interested me mightily as an honest unvarnished
narrative of sea perils; and I see myself now in fancy reading it, the
lanthorn hanging by a laniard close beside my head, the book in one
hand, my pipe in the other, the furnace roaring pleasantly, my feet
close to it, and the atmosphere of the oven fragrant with the punch that
I put there to prevent it from freezing. I had come to a certain page
and was reading this passage: "_Soon after we were on board we all went
into the great cabin, where we found nothing but destruction. Two
scrutores I had there were broke to pieces, and all the fine goods and
necessaries in them were all gone. Moreover, two large chests that had
books in them were empty, and I was afterwards informed they had been
all thrown overboard; for one of the pirates on opening them swore there
was jaw-work enough (as he called it) to serve a nation, and proposed
that they might be cast into the sea, for he feared there might be some
books amongst them that might breed mischief enough, an