d busy around me: one part labouring for bread,
another part squandering in vile excesses or empty pleasures, but equally
miserable because the end they proposed still fled from them; for the men
of pleasure every day surfeited of their vice, and heaped up work for
sorrow and repentance; and the men of labour spent their strength in
daily struggling for bread to maintain the vital strength they laboured
with: so living in a daily circulation of sorrow, living but to work, and
working but to live, as if daily bread were the only end of wearisome
life, and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily bread.

This put me in mind of the life I lived in my kingdom, the island; where
I suffered no more corn to grow, because I did not want it; and bred no
more goats, because I had no more use for them; where the money lay in
the drawer till it grew mouldy, and had scarce the favour to be looked
upon in twenty years. All these things, had I improved them as I ought
to have done, and as reason and religion had dictated to me, would have
taught me to search farther than human enjoyments for a full felicity;
and that there was something which certainly was the reason and end of
life superior to all these things, and which was either to be possessed,
or at least hoped for, on this side of the grave.

But my sage counsellor was gone; I was like a ship without a pilot, that
could only run afore the wind. My thoughts ran all away again into the
old affair; my head was quite turned with the whimsies of foreign
adventures; and all the pleasant, innocent amusements of my farm, my
garden, my cattle, and my family, which before entirely possessed me,
were nothing to me, had no relish, and were like music to one that has no
ear, or food to one that has no taste. In a word, I resolved to leave
off housekeeping, let my farm, and return to London; and in a few months
after I did so.

When I came to London, I was still as uneasy as I was before; I had no
relish for the place, no employment in it, nothing to do but to saunter
about like an idle person, of whom it may be said he is perfectly useless
in God's creation, and it is not one farthing's matter to the rest of his
kind whether he be dead or alive. This also was the thing which, of all
circumstances of life, was the most my aversion, who had been all my days
used to an active life; and I would often say to myself, "A state of
idleness is the very dregs of life;" and, indeed, I thought