This made my life better than
sociable, for when I began to regret the want of conversation I
would ask myself, whether thus conversing mutually with my own
thoughts, and (as I hope I may say) with even God Himself, by
ejaculations, was not better than the utmost enjoyment of human
society in the world?
CHAPTER X - TAMES GOATS
I CANNOT say that after this, for five years, any extraordinary
thing happened to me, but I lived on in the same course, in the
same posture and place, as before; the chief things I was employed
in, besides my yearly labour of planting my barley and rice, and
curing my raisins, of both which I always kept up just enough to
have sufficient stock of one year's provisions beforehand; I say,
besides this yearly labour, and my daily pursuit of going out with
my gun, I had one labour, to make a canoe, which at last I
finished: so that, by digging a canal to it of six feet wide and
four feet deep, I brought it into the creek, almost half a mile.
As for the first, which was so vastly big, for I made it without
considering beforehand, as I ought to have done, how I should be
able to launch it, so, never being able to bring it into the water,
or bring the water to it, I was obliged to let it lie where it was
as a memorandum to teach me to be wiser the next time: indeed, the
next time, though I could not get a tree proper for it, and was in
a place where I could not get the water to it at any less distance
than, as I have said, near half a mile, yet, as I saw it was
practicable at last, I never gave it over; and though I was near
two years about it, yet I never grudged my labour, in hopes of
having a boat to go off to sea at last.
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