394 THE SPANIARD’S STORY,

Their behaviour was to the last degree obliging and courteous, and
yet mixed with a manly, majestic gravity, which very well became
them; and, in short, they had so much more manners than I that
I scarce knew how to receive their civilities, much less how to
return them in kind.

The history of their coming to, and conduct in, the island, after
my going away, is so very remarkable, and has so many incidents
which the former part of my relation will help to understand, and
which will in most of the particulars refer to that account T have
already given, that I cannot but commit them with great delight
to the reading of those that come after me.

I shall no longer trouble the story with a relation in the first
person, which will put me to the expense of ten thousand “ said T's”

,

and “said he’s,” and “he told me’s”’ and ‘‘J told him’s,” and the
like; but I shall collect the facts historically as near as I can
gather them out of my memory from what they related to me, and
from what I met with in my conversing with them and with the
place.

In order to do this succinctly, and as intelligibly as I can, 1
must go back to the circumstance in which I left the island, and
in which the persons were of whom [am to speak. And first, it
is necessary to repeat that I had sent away Friday’s father and the
Spaniard, the two whose lives [had rescued from the savages : I
say, I had sent them away in a large canoe to the main, as I then
thought it, to fetch over the Spaniard’s companions, whom he had
left behind him, in order to save them from the like calamity that
he had been in; and in order to succour them for the present, and
that if possible we might together find some way for our deliver-
ance afterward.

When I sent them away, I had no visible appearance of, or the
least room to hope for, my own deliverance, any more than I had
twenty years before; much less had I any fore-knowledge of what
afterwards happened, I mean of an English ship coming on shore
there to fetch me off; and it could not but be a very great surprise
to them when they came back, not only to find that I was gone,
but to find three strangers left on the spot, possessed of all that
I had left behind me, which would otherwise have been their own.