202 AN ABSOLUTE MONARCH,

very readily and handily, though after a great many essays and
miscarriages, made me both butter and cheese at last, and never
wanted them afterwards.

How mercifully can our great Creator treat his creatures, even
in those conditions in which they seem 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 to dinner. There was my Majesty, the prince and
lord of the whole island. I had the lives of all my subjects at my
absolute command—I could hang, draw, give liberty, and take it
away; and no rebels among all my subjects.

Then to see how like a king I dined, too, all alone, attended by
my servants. Poll, as if he had been my favourite, was the only
person permitted to talk to me. My dog—which was now grown
very old and crazy, and had found no species to multiply his kind
upon—sat always at my right hand; and two cats, one on one side
the table and one on the other, expecting now and then a bit from
my hand, as a mark of special favour.

But these were not the two cats which I brought on shore at
first—for they were both of them dead, and had been interred near
my habitation by my own hand; but one of them having multiplied
by I know not what kind of creature, these were two which I had
preserved tame, whereas the rest ran wild in the woods, and be-
came indeed troublesome to me at last—for they would often come
into my house, and plunder me too, till at last I was obliged to
shoot them, and did killa great many. At length they left me
with this attendance, and in this plentiful manner I lived. Neither
could I be said to want anything but society; and of that, in some
time after this, I was like to have too much.

I was something impatient, as I have observed, to have the use
of my boat—though very loath to run any more hazards; and
therefore sometimes I sat contriving ways to get her about the
island, and at other times I sat myself down contented enough
without her. But I had a strange uneasiness in my mind to go