AN ESTIMATE OF THEIR RESULTS. 286

to keep them from devouring me and all I had. But at length,
when the two old ones I had brought with me were gone, and after
some time continually driving them from me, and letting them
have no provision with me, they all ran wild into the woods except
two or three favourites, which I] kept tame, and whose young, when
they had any, I always drowned. And these were part of my
family. Besides these, I always kept two or three household kids
about me, which I taught to feed out of my hand. And I had two
more parrots which talked pretty well, and would all call Robin
Crusoe, but none like my first. Nor indeed did I take the pains
with any of them that I had done with him. TI had also several
tame sea-fowls, whose names I know not, which I caught upon the
shore and cut their wings. And the little stakes which I had
planted before my castle wall being now grown up to a good thick
grove, these fowls all lived among these low trees, and bred there;
which was very agreeable to me. So that, as I said above, I began
to be very well contented with the life I led, if it might but have
heen secured from the dread of the savages.

But it was otherwise directed. And it may not be amiss for
all people who shall meet with my story to make this just observa-
tion from it—namely, how frequently in the course of our lives
the evil which in itself we seek most to shun, and which, when
we are fallen into it, is the most dreadful to us, is oftentimes the
very means or door of our deliverance, by which alone we can be
raised again from the affliction we are fallen into. I could give
many examples of this in the course of my unaccountable life, but
in nothing was it more particularly remarkable than in the circum-
stances of my last years of solitary residence in this island.

It was now the month of December, as I said above, in my
twenty-third year; and this being the southern solstice, for winter
I cannot call it, was the particular time of my harvest, and required
my being pretty much abroad in the fields: when going out pretty
early in the morning, even before it was thorough daylight, I was sur-
prised with seeing the light of some fire upon the shore, at a distance
from me of about two miles, towards the end of the island where I
had observed some savages had been as before; but not on the other
side, but, to my great affliction, it was on my side of the island.