nowledging
His righteous judgments upon me, and praying to Him to have mercy on me
through Jesus Christ; and not having tasted the least refreshment for
twelve hours, even till the going down of the sun, I then ate a
biscuit-cake and a bunch of grapes, and went to bed, finishing the day as
I began it. I had all this time observed no Sabbath day; for as at first
I had no sense of religion upon my mind, I had, after some time, omitted
to distinguish the weeks, by making a longer notch than ordinary for the
Sabbath day, and so did not really know what any of the days were; but
now, having cast up the days as above, I found I had been there a year;
so I divided it into weeks, and set apart every seventh day for a
Sabbath; though I found at the end of my account I had lost a day or two
in my reckoning. A little after this, my ink began to fail me, and so I
contented myself to use it more sparingly, and to write down only the
most remarkable events of my life, without continuing a daily memorandum
of other things.

The rainy season and the dry season began now to appear regular to me,
and I learned to divide them so as to provide for them accordingly; but I
bought all my experience before I had it, and this I am going to relate
was one of the most discouraging experiments that I made.

I have mentioned that I had saved the few ears of barley and rice, which
I had so surprisingly found spring up, as I thought, of themselves, and I
believe there were about thirty stalks of rice, and about twenty of
barley; and now I thought it a proper time to sow it, after the rains,
the sun being in its southern position, going from me. Accordingly, I
dug up a piece of ground as well as I could with my wooden spade, and
dividing it into two parts, I sowed my grain; but as I was sowing, it
casually occurred to my thoughts that I would not sow it all at first,
because I did not know when was the proper time for it, so I sowed about
two-thirds of the seed, leaving about a handful of each. It was a great
comfort to me afterwards that I did so, for not one grain of what I sowed
this time came to anything: for the dry months following, the earth
having had no rain after the seed was sown, it had no moisture to assist
its growth, and never came up at all till the wet season had come again,
and then it grew as if it had been but newly sown. Finding my first seed
did not grow, which I easily imagined was by the drought, I sought for a
moister pi