itude of ocean? My arms with which to work, my back
with which to bend and lift, my hands cunning to clutch and hold--were
not these parts too in God's plan? Much I pondered the matter. I know
that I was right.

In the sixth year I increased the base of my pyramid, so that in eighteen
months thereafter the height of my monument was fifty feet above the
height of the island. This was no tower of Babel. It served two right
purposes. It gave me a lookout from which to scan the ocean for ships,
and increased the likelihood of my island being sighted by the careless
roving eye of any seaman. And it kept my body and mind in health. With
hands never idle, there was small opportunity for Satan on that island.
Only in my dreams did he torment me, principally with visions of varied
foods and with imagined indulgence in the foul weed called tobacco.

On the eighteenth day of the month of June, in the sixth year of my
sojourn on the island, I descried a sail. But it passed far to leeward
at too great a distance to discover me. Rather than suffering
disappointment, the very appearance of this sail afforded me the
liveliest satisfaction. It convinced me of a fact that I had before in a
degree doubted, to wit: that these seas were sometimes visited by
navigators.

Among other things, where the seals hauled up out of the sea, I built
wide-spreading wings of low rock walls that narrowed to a _cul de sac_,
where I might conveniently kill such seals as entered without exciting
their fellows outside and without permitting any wounded or frightening
seal to escape and spread a contagion of alarm. Seven months to this
structure alone were devoted.

As the time passed, I grew more contented with my lot, and the devil came
less and less in my sleep to torment the old Adam in me with lawless
visions of tobacco and savoury foods. And I continued to eat my seal
meat and call it good, and to drink the sweet rainwater of which always I
had plenty, and to be grateful to God. And God heard me, I know, for
during all my term on that island I knew never a moment of sickness, save
two, both of which were due to my gluttony, as I shall later relate.

In the fifth year, ere I had convinced myself that the keels of ships did
on occasion plough these seas, I began carving on my oar minutes of the
more remarkable incidents that had attended me since I quitted the
peaceful shores of America. This I rendered as intelligible and
permanent as