Bobonasa. Doubtless this interval must have
appeared to her of great length; and how a female so delicately
educated, and in such a state of want and exhaustion, could support her
distress, though but half the time, appears most wonderful. She assured
me that she was ten days alone in the wood, two awaiting death by the
side of her brothers, the other eight wandering at random. The
remembrance of the shocking spectacle she witnessed, the horror incident
on her solitude and the darkness of night in a desert, the perpetual
apprehension of death, which every instant served to augment, had such
effect on her spirits as to cause her hair to turn grey. On the second
day's march, the distance necessarily inconsiderable, she found water,
and the succeeding day some wild fruit and fresh eggs, of what bird she
knew not, but which, by her description, I conjecture to have been a
species of partridge. These with the greatest difficulty was she enabled
to swallow, the oesophagus, owing to the want of aliment, having become
so much parched and straitened; but these and other food she
accidentally met with, sufficed to support her skeleton frame. At
length, and not before it was indispensable, arrived the succour
designed for her by Providence.

Were it told in a romance that a female of delicate habit, accustomed to
all the comforts of life, had been precipitated into a river; that,
after being withdrawn when on the point of drowning, this female, the
eighth of a party, had penetrated into unknown and pathless woods, and
travelled in them for weeks, not knowing whither she directed her steps;
that, enduring hunger, thirst, and fatigue to very exhaustion, she
should have seen her two brothers, far more robust than her, a nephew
yet a youth, three young women her servants, and a young man, the
domestic left by the physician who had gone on before, all expire by her
side, and she yet survive; that, after remaining by their corpses two
whole days and nights, in a country abounding in tigers and numbers of
dangerous serpents, without once seeing any of these animals or
reptiles, she should afterwards have strength to rise, and continue her
way, covered with tatters, through the same pathless wood for eight days
together till she reached the banks of the Bobonasa, the author would be
charged with inconsistency; but the historian should paint facts to his
reader, and this is nothing but the truth. The truth of this marvellous
tale is attest