CRUSOE’S REMARKABLE DAYS. 187

after 1 did make a just improvement of these things, 1 went away
and was no more sad.

I had now been here so long that many things which I brought
on shore for my help were either quite gone or very much wasted
and near spent.

My ink, as I observed, had been gone for some time, all but a
very little, which I eked out with water a little and a little till
it was so pale it scarce left any appearance of black upon the paper.
As long as it lasted I made use of it to minute down the days of
the month on which any remarkable thing happened to me, and
first by casting up times past. I remember that there was a
strange concurrence of days in the various providences which befel
me, and which, if I had been superstitiously inclined to observe
days as fatal or fortunate, I might have had reason to have looked
upon with a great deal of curiosity.

First, I had observed that the same day that I broke away from
my father and my friends, and ran away to Hull, in order to go
to sea, the same day afterwards I was taken by the Sallee man-of-
war, and made a slave.

The same day of the year that I escaped out of the wreck of
that ship in Yarmouth Roads, that same day-year afterwards I
made my escape from Sallee in the boat.

The same day of the year I was born on—namely, the 30th of
September—that same day I had my life so miraculously saved
twenty-six year after, when I was cast ashore on this island, so
that my wicked 1ife and my solitary life began both on a day.

The next thing to my ink’s being wasted was that of my bread
—I mean the biscuit which I brought out of the ship. This I had
husbanded to the last degree, allowing myself but one cake of
bread a day for above a year, and yet I was quite without bread
for near a year before I got any corn of my own; and great reason
I had to be thankful that I had any at all, the getting it being,
as has been already observed, next to miraculous.

My clothes began to decay too mightily. As to linen, I had
none a good while, except some checkered shirts which I found
in the chests of the other seamen, and which I carefully preserved,
because many times I could bear no other clothes on than a shirt: