may be added the exceeding
laboriousness of my work; the many hours which, for want of tools, want
of help, and want of skill, everything I did took up out of my time. For
example, I was full two and forty days in making a board for a long
shelf, which I wanted in my cave; whereas, two sawyers, with their tools
and a saw-pit, would have cut six of them out of the same tree in half a
day.

My case was this: it was to be a large tree which was to be cut down,
because my board was to be a broad one. This tree I was three days in
cutting down, and two more cutting off the boughs, and reducing it to a
log or piece of timber. With inexpressible hacking and hewing I reduced
both the sides of it into chips till it began to be light enough to move;
then I turned it, and made one side of it smooth and flat as a board from
end to end; then, turning that side downward, cut the other side til I
brought the plank to be about three inches thick, and smooth on both
sides. Any one may judge the labour of my hands in such a piece of work;
but labour and patience carried me through that, and many other things.
I only observe this in particular, to show the reason why so much of my
time went away with so little work--viz. that what might be a little to
be done with help and tools, was a vast labour and required a prodigious
time to do alone, and by hand. But notwithstanding this, with patience
and labour I got through everything that my circumstances made necessary
to me to do, as will appear by what follows.

I was now, in the months of November and December, expecting my crop of
barley and rice. The ground I had manured and dug up for them was not
great; for, as I observed, my seed of each was not above the quantity of
half a peck, for I had lost one whole crop by sowing in the dry season.
But now my crop promised very well, when on a sudden I found I was in
danger of losing it all again by enemies of several sorts, which it was
scarcely possible to keep from it; as, first, the goats, and wild
creatures which I called hares, who, tasting the sweetness of the blade,
lay in it night and day, as soon as it came up, and eat it so close, that
it could get no time to shoot up into stalk.

This I saw no remedy for but by making an enclosure about it with a
hedge; which I did with a great deal of toil, and the more, because it
required speed. However, as my arable land was but small, suited to my
crop, I got it totally well fenced in a