366 PROS AND CONS,

I would do, so, as it seemed to her that the thing was determined
above, she would not be the only obstruction; for if I thought fit,
and resolved to go Here she found me very intent upon her
words, and that I looked very earnestly at her, so that it a little
disordered her, and she stopped. I asked her why she did not go
on, and say out what she was going to say? But I perceived her
heart was too full, and some tears stood in her eyes. “ Speak out,
my dear,” said I; “are you willing I should go?” “No,” says
she, very affectionately, “I am far from willing. But if yon are
resolved to go,” says she, “and rather than I will be the only
hindrance, I will go with you: for though I think it a most pre-
posterous thing for one of your years, and in your condition, yet if
it must be,” said she, again weeping, “ I won’t leave you: for if it
be of Heaven, you must do it—there is no resisting it; and if
Heaven makes it your duty to go, he will also make it mine to go
with you, or otherwise dispose of me, that I may not obstruct it.”

This affectionate behaviour of my wife’s brought me a little out
of the vapours, and I began to consider what I was adoing. I
corrected my wandering fancy, and began to argue with myself
sedately what business I had, after threescore years, and after such
a life of tedious sufferings and disasters, and closed in so happy and
easy a manner, I say, what business I had to rush into new
hazards, and put myself upon adventures fit only for youth and
poverty to run into?

With those thoughts, I considered my new engagement, that I
had a wife, one child born, and my wife then great with child of
another; that I had all the world could give me, and had no need
to seek hazards for gain; that I was declining in years, and ought
to think rather of leaving what I had gained than of seeking to in-
crease it; that as to what my wife had said, of its being an im-
pulse from Heaven, and that it should be my duty to go, I had no
notion of that: so, after many of these cogitations, I struggled
with the power of my imagination, reasoned myself out of it, as I
believe people may always do in like cases, if they will; and, in a
word, I conquered it; composed myself with such arguments as
occurred to my thought, and which my present condition furnished
me plentifully with, and particularly, as the most effectual method, I