Certainly a Stoic would have smiled to see me at dinner.  There sat my royal majesty, and absolute prince and ruler of my kingdom, attended by my dutiful subjects, whom, if I pleased, I could either hang, draw, quarter, give them liberty, or take it away.  When I dined, I seemed a king eating alone, none daring to presume to do so till I had done. Poll, as if he had been my principal court favorite, was the only person, permitted to talk with me.  My old but faithful dog, now grown exceedingly crazy, and who had no species to multiply his kind upon, continually sat on my right hand; while my two cats sat on each side of the table, expecting a bit from my hand, as a principal mark of my royal favour.  These were not the cats I had brought from the ship; they had been dead long before, and interred near my habitation by mine own hand.  But one of them, as I suppose, generating with a wild cat, a couple of their young I had made tame; the rest ran wild into the woods, and in time grew so impudent as to return and plunder me of my stores, till such time as I shot a great many, and the rest left me without troubling me any more.  In this plentiful manner did I live, wanting for nothing but conversation.  One thing indeed concerned me, the want of my boat; I knew not which way to get her round the island.  One time I resolved to go along the shore by land to her; but had any one in England met such a figure, it would either have affrighted them, or made them burst into laughter; nay, I could not but smile myself at my habit, which I think in this place will be very proper to describe.

The cap I wore on my head, was great, high, and shapeless, made of a goat’s skin, with a flap of pent-house hanging down behind, not only to keep the sun from me, but to shoot the rain off from running into my neck, nothing being more pernicious than the rain falling upon the flesh in these climates.  I had a short jacket of goat’s skin, whose hair hung down such a length on each side, that it reached down to the calves of my legs.  As for shoes and stockings, I had none, but made a semblance of something, I know not what to call them; they were made like buskins, and laced on the sides like spatterdashes, Barbarously shaped like the rest of my habit.  I had a broad belt of goat’s skin dried, girt round me with a couple of thongs, instead of buckles; on each of which, to supply the deficiency of sword and dagger, hung my hatchet and saw.  I had another belt, not so broad, yet fastened in the same manner, which hung over my shoulder, and at the end of it, under my left arm, hung two pouches, made of goat’s skin, to hold my powder and shot.  My basket I carried on my back, and my gun on my shoulder; and over my head a great clumsy ugly goat’s skin umbrella; which, however, next to my gun, was the most necessary thing about me.  As for my face, the colour was not so swarthy as the Mulattoes, or might have been expected from one who took to little care of it, in a climate within nine or ten degrees