Yet is man ever a strange and unaccountable creature.  I, who had asked of God’s mercy no more than putrid meat to eat and a sufficiency of water not too brackish, was no sooner blessed with an abundance of cured meat and sweet water than I began to know discontent with my lot.  I began to want fire, and the savour of cooked meat in my mouth.  And continually I would discover myself longing for certain delicacies of the palate such as were part of the common daily fare on the home table at Elkton.  Strive as I would, ever my fancy eluded my will and wantoned in day-dreaming of the good things I had eaten and of the good things I would eat if ever I were rescued from my lonely situation.

It was the old Adam in me, I suppose—­the taint of that first father who was the first rebel against God’s commandments.  Most strange is man, ever insatiable, ever unsatisfied, never at peace with God or himself, his days filled with restlessness and useless endeavour, his nights a glut of vain dreams of desires wilful and wrong.  Yes, and also I was much annoyed by my craving for tobacco.  My sleep was often a torment to me, for it was then that my desires took licence to rove, so that a thousand times I dreamed myself possessed of hogsheads of tobacco—­ay, and of warehouses of tobacco, and of shiploads and of entire plantations of tobacco.

But I revenged myself upon myself.  I prayed God unceasingly for a humble heart, and chastised my flesh with unremitting toil.  Unable to improve my mind, I determined to improve my barren island.  I laboured four months at constructing a stone wall thirty feet long, including its wings, and a dozen feet high.  This was as a protection to the hut in the periods of the great gales when all the island was as a tiny petrel in the maw of the hurricane.  Nor did I conceive the time misspent.  Thereafter I lay snug in the heart of calm while all the air for a hundred feet above my head was one stream of gust-driven water.

In the third year I began me a pillar of rock.  Rather was it a pyramid, four-square, broad at the base, sloping upward not steeply to the apex.  In this fashion I was compelled to build, for gear and timber there was none in all the island for the construction of scaffolding.  Not until the close of the fifth year was my pyramid complete.  It stood on the summit of the island.  Now, when I state that the summit was but forty feet above the sea, and that the peak of my pyramid was forty feet above the summit, it will be conceived that I, without tools, had doubled the stature of the island.  It might be urged by some unthinking ones that I interfered with God’s plan in the creation of the world.  Not so, I hold.  For was not I equally a part of God’s plan, along with this heap of rocks upjutting in the solitude 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.