had never touched them.  At their feet tufts of briers and other underbrush had grown up, as formerly.  The two streams, the Linnet and the Stammerer, alone had suffered no change.  The one with its gentle murmur, the other with its silvery cascades, after having embraced the lawn, still continued to flow towards the sea, where they seemed to have buried, with their waves, the memory of all that had passed on their borders.

At sight of his shore, which seemed to have retained no vestige of himself, Selkirk remained a few moments, mournful and lost in his incoherent thoughts, in the midst of which this was most prominent:—­Yet alive, already forgotten by the world, I have seen my traces disappear, even from this island which I have so long inhabited!

A rustling was heard in the foliage; he raised his eyes, expecting to see Marimonda swinging on the branch of a tree.  Perceiving nothing, he remembered that Marimonda reposed at the Oasis; he took the road from the mountain which led thither, but when he arrived there, when he was before her tomb, covered with tall grass, he had forgotten why he came.

One of those unaccountable fits of terror, which were now more frequent than formerly, seized him, and he precipitately descended the mountain, springing from peak to peak along the rocks.

The religious sentiment, which formerly sustained Selkirk in his trials, was not entirely extinct; but it was obscured beneath his darkened reason.  His religion was only that of fear.  When the sea was violently agitated, when the storm howled, he prostrated himself with clasped hands; but it was no longer God whom he implored; it was the angry ocean, the thunder.  He sought to disarm the genius of evil.  The lightning having one day struck, not far from him, a date-palm, he worshipped the tree.  His perverted faith had at last terminated in idolatry.

This was, in substance, what Alexander Selkirk related to William Dampier; what solitude had done for this man, still so young, and formerly so intelligent; this was what had become of the despiser of men, when left to his own reason.

Dampier listened with the most profound attention, interrupting him in his narrative only by exclamations of interest or of pity.  When he ceased to speak, holding out his hand to him, he said: 

’My boy, the lesson is a rude one, but let it be profitable to you; let it teach you that ennui on board a vessel, even with a Stradling, is better than ennui in a desert.  Undoubtedly there are among us troublesome, wicked people, but fewer wicked than crack-brained.  Believe, then, in friendship, especially in mine; from this day it is yours, on the faith of William Dampier.’

And he opened his arms to the young man, who threw himself into them.

On their return to the vessel, Dampier presented to Selkirk his own Bible.  The latter seized it with avidity, and, after having turned over its leaves as if to find a text which presented itself to his mind, read aloud the following passage: