FAIRY COVE.
The big tears stood in my eyes when I was through; but I found consolation in reading it again and again; in picturing out a thousand things that perhaps De Foe never dreamt of; and each night when I went to bed I earnestly prayed to God that I might some day or other be cast upon a desolate island, and live to become as wonderful a man as Robinson Crusoe. Yet, not content with that, I devoted all my leisure hours to making knife-cases, caps, and shot-pouches out of rabbit-skins, in the faint hope that it would hasten the blissful disaster. Years passed away; I lived on the banks of the Ohio; I had been upon the ocean. Still a boy in years, and more so perhaps in feeling, the dream was not ended. I gathered up drift-wood, and built a hut among the rocks; whole days I lay there thinking of that island in the far-off seas. A piece of tarred plank from some steam-boat had a sweeter scent to me than the most odorous flower; for, as I lay smelling it by the hour, it brought up such exquisite visions of shipwreck as never before, perhaps, so charmed the fancy of a dreaming youth. Well I remembered, too, the favored few that I let into the secret; how we went every afternoon to a sand-bar, and called it Crusoe's Island; how I was Robinson Crusoe, and the friend of my heart Friday, whom I caused to be painted from head to foot with black mud, as also the rest of my friends; and then the battles we had; the devouring of the dead men; the horrible dances, and chasing into the water; and, above all, the rescue of my beloved Friday—how vividly I saw those scenes again!
RESCUE OF FRIDAY.
Years passed on; I was a sailor before the mast. Alas! what a sad reality! I saw men flogged like beasts; I saw cruelty, hardship, disease, death in their worst forms; so much I saw that I was glad to take the place of a wandering outcast upon the shores of a sickly island ten thousand miles from home, to escape the horrors of that life. Yet the dream was not ended. Bright and beautiful as ever seemed to me that little world upon the seas, where dwelt in solitude the shipwrecked mariner. In the vicissitudes of fortune, I was again a wanderer; impelled by that vision of island-life which for seventeen years had never ceased to haunt me, I cast all upon the hazard of a die—escaped in an open boat through the perils of a storm, and now—where was I? What pleasant sadness was it that weighed upon my heart? Was all this a dream of youth; was it here to end, never more to give one gleam of joy; was the happy credulity, the freshness, the enthusiasm of boyhood gone forever? Could it be that this was not Crusoe's Valley at last—this spot, which I had often seen in fancy from the banks of the Ohio, dim in the mist of seas that lay between? Did I really wander through it, or was it still a dream?
And where was the king of the island; the hero of my boyish fancy; he who had delighted me with the narrative of his romantic career, as man had never done before, as all the pleasures of life have never done since; where was the genial, the earnest, the adventurous Robinson Crusoe? Could it be that there was no "mortal mixture of earth's mould in him;" that he was barely the simple mariner Alexander Selkirk? No! no! Robinson Crusoe himself had wandered through these very groves of myrtle; he had quenched his thirst in the spring that bubbled through the moss at my feet; had slept during the glare of noon in the shade of those overhanging grottoes; had dreamed his day-dreams in these secluded glens.
