ROBINSON CRUSOE 107

long as it lasted I made use of it to minute down the days of the
month on which any remarkable thing happened to me; and first,
by casting up times past, I remembered that there was a strange
concurrence of days in the various providences which befell me,
and which, if I had been superstitiously inclined to observe days
as fatal or fortunate, I might have had reason to have looked
upon with a great deal of curiosity.

First, 1 had observed that the same day that I broke away
from my father and friends and ran away to Hull, in order to
go to sea, the same day afterwards I was taken by the Sallee
man-of-war, and made a slave; the same day of the year that I
escaped out of the wreck of that ship in Yarmouth Roads, that
same day-year afterwards I made my escape from Sallee in a
boat ; the same day of the year I was born on—viz. the 30th of
September, that same day I had my life so miraculously saved
twenty-six years after, when I was cast on shore in this island ;
so that my wicked life and my solitary life began both on a day.

The next thing to my ink being wasted was that of my bread
—I mean the biscuit which I brought out of the ship; this I
had husbanded to the last degree, allowing myself but one cake
of bread a-day for above a year; and yet I was quite without
bread for near a year before I got any corn of my own, and great
reason I had to be thankful that I had any at all, the getting it
being, as has been already observed, next to miraculous.

My clothes, too, began to decay ; as to linen, I had had none
a good while, except some chequered shirts which I found in the
chests of the other seamen, and which I carefully preserved ;
because many times I could bear no other clothes on but a shirt;
and it was a very great help to me that I had, among all the
men’s clothes of the ship, almost three dozen of shirts. There
were also, indeed, several thick watch-coats of the seamen’s which
were left, but they were too hot to wear; and though it is true
that the weather was so violently hot that there was no need of
clothes, yet I could not go quite naked—no, though I had been
inclined to it, which I was not—nor could I abide the thought
of it, though I was alone. The reason why I could not go naked
was, I could not bear the heat of the sun so well when quite
naked as with some clothes on; nay, the very heat frequently
blistered my skin: whereas, with a shirt on, the air itself made
some motion, and whistling under the shirt, was twofold cooler
than without it. No more could I ever bring myself to go out
in the heat of the sun without a cap or a hat; the heat of the
sun, beating with such violence as it does in that place, would
give me the headache presently, by darting so directly on my