THE SIGNAL GUN. 239

savages; and if they had fled from me now, I was sure to have
them come back again, with perhaps two or three hundred canoes
with them, in a few days, and then I knew what to expect.

However, I wore out a vear and three inonths more before I
ever saw any more of the savages, and then I found them again,
as I shall soon observe. It is true they might have been there
once or twice, but either they made no stay, or at least I did not
hear them; but in the month of May, as near as I could calculate,
and in my four-and-twentieth year, I had a very strange encounter
with them, of which in its place.

The perturbation of my mind during this fifteen or sixteen
months’ interval was very great. 7. slept unquiet, dreamed always
frightful dreams, and often started out of my sleep in the night.
In the day great troubles overwhelmed my mind, and in the night
I dreamed often of killing the savages, and of the reasons why I
might justify the doing of it. But to waive all this for a while, it
was in the middle of May, on the sixteenth day, I think, as well
as my poor wooden calendar would reckon; for I marked all upon
the post still. I say it was the sixteenth of May, that it blew a
very great storm of wind all day, with a great deal of lightning
and thunder, and a very foul night it was after it. I know not
what was the particular occasion of it; but as I was reading in the
Bible, and taken up with very serious thoughts about my present
condition, I was surprised with a noise of a gun, as I thought,
fired at sea.

This was, to be sure, a surprise of a quite different nature from
any I had met with before; for the notions this put into my
thoughts were quite of another kind. I started up in the greatest
haste imaginable, and in a trice clapped my ladder to the middle
place of the rock, and pulled it after me, and mounting it the second
time, got to the top of the hill, the very moment that a flash of
fire bade me listen for a second gun, which accordingly in about
half a minute I heard, and by the sound knew that it was from that
part of the sea where I was driven down the current in my boat.

I immediately considered that this must be some ship in distress,
and that they had some comrade or some other ship in company,

and fired these guns for signals of distress and to obtain help. I
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