This answered my end, and in about a year and a half I had a flock of about twelve goats, kids and all; and in two years more I had three-and-forty, besides several that I took and killed for my food; and after that I enclosed five several pieces of ground to feed them in, with little pens to drive them into, to take them as I wanted them, and gates out of one piece of ground into another.
But this was not all; for now I not only had got goat’s flesh to feed on when I pleased, but milk, too, a thing which indeed in my beginning I did not so much as think of, and which, when it came into my thoughts, was really an agreeable surprise; for now I set up my dairy, and had sometimes a gallon or two of milk in a day. And as nature, who gives supplies of food to every creature, dictates even naturally how to make use of it, so I, that never milked a cow, much less a goat, or saw butter or cheese made, very readily and handily, though after a great many essays and miscarriages, made me both butter and cheese at last, and never wanted it afterwards.
How mercifully can our great Creator treat his creatures, even in those conditions in which they seem to be overwhelmed in destruction! How can he sweeten the bitterest providences, and give us cause to praise him for dungeons and prisons! What a table was here spread for me in a wilderness, where I saw nothing at first but to perish for hunger!
It would have made a stoic smile, to have seen me and my little family sit down to dinner; there was my majesty, the prince and lord of the whole island; I had the lives of all my subjects at absolute command; I could hang, draw, give life and liberty, and take it away, and no rebels among all my subjects.
Then, to see how like a king I dined, too, all alone, attended by my servants! Poll, as if he had been my favourite, was the only person permitted to talk to me; my dog, which was now grown very old and crazy, and found no species to multiply his kind upon, sat always at my right hand; and two cats, one on one side the table, and one on the other, expecting now and then a bit from my hand, as a mark of special favour.
But these were not the two cats which I brought on shore at first; for they were both of them dead, and had been interred near my habitation by my own hands; but one of them having multiplied by I know not what kind of creature, these were two which I preserved tame, whereas the rest ran wild into the woods, and became, indeed, troublesome to me at last; for they would often come into my house, and plunder me, too, till at last I was obliged to shoot them, and did kill a great many; at length they left me. With this attendance and in this plentiful manner, I lived; neither could I be said to want anything but society, and of that, in some time after this, I was like to have too much.
Chapter XI
I WAS something impatient, as I had observed, to have the use of my boat, though very loath to run any more hazard; and therefore sometimes I sat contriving ways to get her about the island, and at other times I sat myself down contented enough without her. But I had a strange uneasiness in my mind to go down to the point of the island, where, as I have said in my last ramble, I went up the hill to see how the shore lay, and how the current set, that I might see what I had to do. This inclination increased upon me every day, and at length I resolved to travel thither by land, and, following the edge of the shore, I did so; but had any one in England been to meet such a man as I was, it must either have frightened him, or raised a great deal of laughter; and as I frequently stood still to look at myself, I could not but smile at the notion of my travelling through Yorkshire with such an equipage, and in such a dress. Be pleased to take a sketch of my figure as follows:—