I believe about fifty yards, when
this thought occurred to me; so I presently stopped short, and, for the
first beginning, I resolved to enclose a piece of about 150 yards in
length, and 100 yards in breadth; which, as it would maintain as many as
I should have in any reasonable time, so, as my stock increased, I could
add more ground to my enclosure.

This was acting with some prudence, and I went to work with courage. I
was about three months hedging in the first piece; and, till I had done
it, I tethered the three kids in the best part of it, and used them to
feed as near me as possible, to make them familiar; and very often I
would go and carry them some ears of barley, or a handful of rice, and
feed them out of my hand: so that after my enclosure was finished, and I
let them loose, they would follow me up and down, bleating after me for
a handful of corn.

This answered my end; and in about a year and a half I had a flock of
about twelve goats, kids and all; and in two years more, I had three and
forty, besides several that I took and killed for my food. After that I
enclosed five several pieces of ground to feed them in, with little pens
to drive them into, to take them as I wanted, and gates out of one piece
of ground into another.

But this was not all; for now I not only had goat's flesh to feed on
when I pleased, but milk too; a thing which, indeed, in the beginning, I
did not so much as think of, and which, when it came into my thoughts,
was really an agreeable surprise: for now I set up my dairy, and had
sometimes a gallon or two of milk in a day. And as nature, who gives
supplies of food to every creature, dictates even naturally how to make
use of it, so I, that had never milked a cow, much less a goat, or seen
butter or cheese made, only when I was a boy, after a great many essays
and miscarriages, made me both butter and cheese at last, and also salt
(though I found it partly made to my hand by the heat of the sun upon
some of the rocks of the sea,) and never wanted it afterwards. How
mercifully can our Creator treat his creatures, even in those conditions
in which they seemed to be overwhelmed in destruction! How can he
sweeten the bitterest providences, and give us cause to praise him for
dungeons and prisons! What a table was here spread for me in a
wilderness, where I saw nothing, at first, but to perish for hunger!

It would have made a stoic smile, to have seen me and my little family
sit down