meat in my mouth. And continually I
would discover myself longing for certain delicacies of the palate such
as were part of the common daily fare on the home table at Elkton. Strive
as I would, ever my fancy eluded my will and wantoned in day-dreaming of
the good things I had eaten and of the good things I would eat if ever I
were rescued from my lonely situation.

It was the old Adam in me, I suppose--the taint of that first father who
was the first rebel against God's commandments. Most strange is man,
ever insatiable, ever unsatisfied, never at peace with God or himself,
his days filled with restlessness and useless endeavour, his nights a
glut of vain dreams of desires wilful and wrong. Yes, and also I was
much annoyed by my craving for tobacco. My sleep was often a torment to
me, for it was then that my desires took licence to rove, so that a
thousand times I dreamed myself possessed of hogsheads of tobacco--ay,
and of warehouses of tobacco, and of shiploads and of entire plantations
of tobacco.

But I revenged myself upon myself. I prayed God unceasingly for a humble
heart, and chastised my flesh with unremitting toil. Unable to improve
my mind, I determined to improve my barren island. I laboured four
months at constructing a stone wall thirty feet long, including its
wings, and a dozen feet high. This was as a protection to the hut in the
periods of the great gales when all the island was as a tiny petrel in
the maw of the hurricane. Nor did I conceive the time misspent.
Thereafter I lay snug in the heart of calm while all the air for a
hundred feet above my head was one stream of gust-driven water.

In the third year I began me a pillar of rock. Rather was it a pyramid,
four-square, broad at the base, sloping upward not steeply to the apex.
In this fashion I was compelled to build, for gear and timber there was
none in all the island for the construction of scaffolding. Not until
the close of the fifth year was my pyramid complete. It stood on the
summit of the island. Now, when I state that the summit was but forty
feet above the sea, and that the peak of my pyramid was forty feet above
the summit, it will be conceived that I, without tools, had doubled the
stature of the island. It might be urged by some unthinking ones that I
interfered with God's plan in the creation of the world. Not so, I hold.
For was not I equally a part of God's plan, along with this heap of rocks
upjutting in the sol