beds were plantain leaves, which they spread
upon the sand, and which were as soft as a mattress; their cloaks served
them for bed-clothes, and some bunches of grass for pillows: With these
accommodations they hoped to pass a better night than the last,
especially as, to their great comfort, not a musquito was to be seen.
Here then they lay down, and, such is the force of habit, they resigned
themselves to sleep, without once reflecting upon the probability and
danger of being found by the Indians in that situation. If this appears
strange, let us for a moment reflect, that every danger, and every
calamity, after a time becomes familiar, and loses its effect upon the
mind. If it were possible that a man should first be made acquainted
with his mortality, or even with the inevitable debility and infirmities
of old age, when his understanding had arrived at its full strength, and
life was endeared by the enjoyments of youth, and vigour, and health,
with what an agony of terror and distress would the intelligence be
received! yet, being gradually acquainted with these mournful truths, by
insensible degrees, we scarce know when, they lose all their force, and
we think no more of the approach of old age and death, than these
wanderers of an unknown desert did of a less obvious and certain evil,
the approach of the native savages, at a time when they must have fallen
an easy prey to their malice or their fears. And it is remarkable, that
the greater part of those who have been condemned to suffer a violent
death, have slept the night immediately preceding their execution,
though there is perhaps no instance of a person accused of a capital
crime having slept the first night of his confinement. Thus is the evil
of life in some degree a remedy for itself, and though every man at
twenty deprecates fourscore, almost every man is as tenacious of life at
fourscore as at twenty; and if he does not suffer under any painful
disorder, loses as little of the comforts that remain by reflecting that
he is upon the brink of the grave, where the earth already crumbles
under his feet, as he did of the pleasures of his better days, when his
dissolution, though certain, was supposed to be at a distance.[84]

[Footnote 84: The reader will receive this hypothetical statement as he
finds it agreeable, or not, to his own experience,--a better guide, in
all probability, than mere philosophy. The writer has his doubts upon
the subject. But let every