OF ROBINSON CRUSOE.

or other to be thankful for, and may see others in wage circumstances
than our own.

Such certainly was the case of these men, of whom I could not s0
much as see room to suppose any of them were saved; nothing could
make it rational so much as to wish or expect that they did not all
perish there, except the possibility only of their being taken up by
another ship in company: and this was but mere possibility indeed ;
for I saw not the least signal or appearance of any such thing.

I cannot explain, by any possible energy of words, what a strange
longing, or hankering of desire, I felt in my soul upon this sight;
breaking out sometimes thus: ‘Oh, that there had been but one or
two, nay, but one soul saved out of the ship, to have escaped to me,
that I might but have had one companion, one fellow-creature to have
spoken to me, and to have conversed with!’ In all the time of my
solitary life, I never felt so earnest, so strong a desire after the society
of my fellow-creatures, or so deep a regret at the want of it.

There are some secret moving springs in the affections, which, wh
they are set a-going by some object in view, or be it some object, thoug
not in view, yet rendered present to the mind by the power of imagina-
tion, that motion carries out the soul by its impetuosity to such violent
eager embracings of the object, that the absence of it is insupportable.

Such were these earnest wishings that but one man had been saved !
Oh, that it had been but one! I believe I repeated the words, “Oh,
that it had been but one!”’ a thousand times; and my desires were so
moved by it, that when I spoke the words, my hands would clench
together, and my fingers press the palms of my hands, that if I had
had any soft thing in my hand, it would have crushed it involuntarily ;
and my teeth in my head‘would strike together, and set against one
another so strong, that for some time I.could not part them again.

Let the naturalists explain these things, and the reason and manner
of them; all I can say of them is, to describe the fact, which was ever
surprising to me when I found it, though I knew not from what it
should proceed: it was doubtless the effect of ardent wishes, and of
strong ideas formed in my mind, realizing the comfort which the
conversation of-one of my fellow Christians would have been to me.

But it was not to be; either their fate, or mine, or both, forbade it;
for till the last year of my being on this island, I never knew whether
any were saved out of that ship ‘or no; and had only the aflliction,
some days after, to see the corpse of a drowned boy come on shore, at
the end of the island which was next the shipwreck: he ad- on no
clothes but a seaman’s waistcoat, a pair of opened-kneed linen-drawers
and a blue linen shirt; but nothing to direct me so much as to guess