, that it was very pleasant to me;
for I believe no bird ever spoke plainer; and he lived with me no less
than six and twenty years: how long he might have lived afterwards I
know not, though I know they have a notion in the Brazils that they
live a hundred years. My dog was a very pleasant and loving companion to
me for no less than sixteen years of my time, and then died of mere old
age. As for my cats, they multiplied, as I have observed, to that
degree, that I was obliged to shoot several of them at first, to keep
them from devouring me and all I had; but, at length, when the two old
ones I brought with me were gone, and after some time continually
driving them from me, and letting them have no provision with me, they
all ran wild into the woods, except two or three favourites, which I
kept tame, and whose young, when they had any, I always drowned; and
these were part of my family. Besides these, I always kept two or three
household kids about me, whom I taught to feed out of my hand; and I had
two more parrots, which talked pretty well, and would all call Robin
Crusoe, but none like my first; nor, indeed, did I take the pains with
any of them that I had done with him. I had also several tame sea-fowls,
whose names I knew not, that I caught upon the shore, and cut their
wings; and the little stakes which I had planted before my castle wall
being now grown up to a good thick grove, these fowls all lived among
these low trees, and bred there, which was very agreeable to me; so
that, as I said above, I began to be very well contented with the life I
led, if I could have been secured from the dread of the savages. But it
was otherwise directed; and it may not be amiss for all people who shall
meet with my story, to make this just observation from it, viz. How
frequently, in the course of our lives, the evil which in itself we seek
most to shun, and which, when we are, fallen into, is the most dreadful
to us, is oftentimes the very means or door of our deliverance, by which
alone we can be raised again from the affliction we are fallen into. I
could give many examples of this in the course of my unaccountable life;
but in nothing was it more particularly remarkable than in the
circumstances of my last years of solitary residence in this island.

It was now the month of December, as I said above, in my twenty-third
year; and this, being the southern solstice (for winter I cannot call
it,) was the particular time of my har