n-horses, cows, and sheep, and, setting
seriously to work, became in one half-year a mere country gentleman. My
thoughts were entirely taken up in managing my servants, cultivating the
ground, enclosing, planting, &c.; and I lived, as I thought, the most
agreeable life that nature was capable of directing, or that a man always
bred to misfortunes was capable of retreating to.

I farmed upon my own land; I had no rent to pay, was limited by no
articles; I could pull up or cut down as I pleased; what I planted was
for myself, and what I improved was for my family; and having thus left
off the thoughts of wandering, I had not the least discomfort in any part
of life as to this world. Now I thought, indeed, that I enjoyed the
middle state of life which my father so earnestly recommended to me, and
lived a kind of heavenly life, something like what is described by the
poet, upon the subject of a country life:--

"Free from vices, free from care,
Age has no pain, and youth no snare."

But in the middle of all this felicity, one blow from unseen Providence
unhinged me at once; and not only made a breach upon me inevitable and
incurable, but drove me, by its consequences, into a deep relapse of the
wandering disposition, which, as I may say, being born in my very blood,
soon recovered its hold of me; and, like the returns of a violent
distemper, came on with an irresistible force upon me. This blow was the
loss of my wife. It is not my business here to write an elegy upon my
wife, give a character of her particular virtues, and make my court to
the sex by the flattery of a funeral sermon. She was, in a few words,
the stay of all my affairs; the centre of all my enterprises; the engine
that, by her prudence, reduced me to that happy compass I was in, from
the most extravagant and ruinous project that filled my head, and did
more to guide my rambling genius than a mother's tears, a father's
instructions, a friend's counsel, or all my own reasoning powers could
do. I was happy in listening to her, and in being moved by her
entreaties; and to the last degree desolate and dislocated in the world
by the loss of her.

When she was gone, the world looked awkwardly round me. I was as much a
stranger in it, in my thoughts, as I was in the Brazils, when I first
went on shore there; and as much alone, except for the assistance of
servants, as I was in my island. I knew neither what to think nor what
to do. I saw the worl