92 ROBINSON CRUSOE.

improbable, but impossible ; and that therefore I ought not hy
any means to remove. However, I was so enamored of this
place, that I spent much of my time there for the whole of the
remaining part of the month of July ; and though, upon second
thoughts, I resolved not to remove, yet I built me a little kind
of a bower, and surrounded it at a distance with a strong fence,
being a double hedge, as high as I could reach, well staked, and
filled between with brushwood; and here I lay very secure,
sometimes two or three nights together ; always going over it
with a ladder ; so that I fancied now I had my country-house
and my sea-coast house; and this work took me up to the
beginning of August.

[ had but newly finished my fence, and began to enjoy my
labor, when the rains came on, and made me stick close to my
first habitation ; for though I had made me a tent like the other,
with a piece of a sail, and spread it very well, yet I had not the
shelter of a hill to keep me from storms, nor a cave behind me
to retreat into when the rains were extraordinary,

About the beginning of August, as I said, I had finished
my bower, and began to enjoy myself. The 3d of August, I
found the grapes I had hung up perfectly dried, and indeed
were excellent good raisins of the sun ; so I began to take them
down from the trees, and it was very happy that I did so, for
the rains which followed would have spoilt them, and I had
lost the best part of my winter food; for I had above two hun-
dred large bunches of them. No sooner had I taken them all
down, and carried most of them home to my cave, but it began
to rain; and from hence, which was the 14th of August, it
rained, more or less, every day till the middle of October ; and
sometimes so violently, that I could not stir out of my cave for
several days,

In this season I was much surprised with the increase of
my family ; I had been concerned for the loss of one of my cats,
who ran away from me, or, as I thought, had been dead, and I
heard no more tidings of her, till, to my astonishment, she
came home about the end of August with three kittens. This
was the more strange to me, because, though I had killed a
wild cat, as I called it, with my gun, yet I thought it a quite
different kind from our European cat; but the young cats
were the same kind of house-breed as the old one ; and both
my cats being females, I thought it very strange. But from
these three cats, I afterwards came to be so pestered with cats,
that I was forced to kill them like vermin, or wild beasts, and
to drive them from my house as much as possible.