to cut a dock or canal, to bring the water up to
the canoe, seeing I could not bring the canoe down to the water. Well, I
began this work; and when I began to enter upon it, and calculate how
deep it was to be dug, how broad, how the stuff was to be thrown out, I
found by the number of hands I had, having none but my own, that it must
have been ten or twelve years before I could have gone through with it;
for the shore lay so high, that at the upper end it must have been at
least twenty feet deep; this attempt, though with great reluctancy, I
was at length obliged to give over also.

This grieved me heartily; and now I saw, though too late, the folly of
beginning a work before we count the cost, and before we judge rightly
of our own strength to go through with it.

In the middle of this work, I finished my fourth year in this place, and
kept my anniversary with the same devotion, and with as much comfort as
before; for, by a constant study and serious application to the word of
God, and by the assistance of his grace, I gained a different knowledge
from what I had before; I entertained different notions of things; I
looked now upon the world as a thing remote, which I had nothing to do
with, no expectation from, and, indeed, no desires about: in a word, I
had nothing to do with it, nor was ever likely to have; I thought it
looked, as we may perhaps look upon it hereafter, viz. as, a place I had
lived in, but was come out of it; and well might I say, as father
Abraham to Dives, "Between me and thee is a great gulf fixed."

In the first place, I was here removed from all the wickedness of the
world; I had neither the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, nor the
pride of life. I had nothing to covet, for I had all that I was now
capable of enjoying: I was lord of the whole manor; or, if I pleased, I
might call myself king or emperor over the whole country which I had
possession of; there were no rivals; I had no competitor, none to
dispute sovereignty or command with me: I might have raised
ship-loadings of corn, but I had no use for it; so I let as little grow
as I thought enough for my occasion. I had tortoise or turtle enough,
but now and then one was as much as I could put to any use: I had timber
enough to have built a fleet of ships; and I had grapes enough to have
made wine, or to have cured into raisins, to have loaded that fleet when
it had been built.

But all I could make use of was all that was valuable: