that, as I now was, I must continue, day after day, month after month, year after year, while I lived.  I hardly dared conjecture what space of time that expression implied.  It is true, I was no longer in the first blush of manhood; neither had I declined far in the vale of years—­men have accounted mine the prime of life:  I had just entered my thirty-seventh year; every limb was as well knit, every articulation as true, as when I had acted the shepherd on the hills of Cumberland; and with these advantages I was to commence the train of solitary life.  Such were the reflections that ushered in my slumber on that night.

The shelter, however, and less disturbed repose which I enjoyed, restored me the following morning to a greater portion of health and strength, than I had experienced since my fatal shipwreck.  Among the stores I had discovered on searching the cottage the preceding night, was a quantity of dried grapes; these refreshed me in the morning, as I left my lodging and proceeded towards a town which I discerned at no great distance.  As far as I could divine, it must have been Forli.  I entered with pleasure its wide and grassy streets.  All, it is true, pictured the excess of desolation; yet I loved to find myself in those spots which had been the abode of my fellow creatures.  I delighted to traverse street after street, to look up at the tall houses, and repeat to myself, once they contained beings similar to myself—­I was not always the wretch I am now.  The wide square of Forli, the arcade around it, its light and pleasant aspect cheered me.  I was pleased with the idea, that, if the earth should be again peopled, we, the lost race, would, in the relics left behind, present no contemptible exhibition of our powers to the new comers.

I entered one of the palaces, and opened the door of a magnificent saloon.  I started—­I looked again with renewed wonder.  What wild-looking, unkempt, half-naked savage was that before me?  The surprise was momentary.

I perceived that it was I myself whom I beheld in a large mirror at the end of the hall.  No wonder that the lover of the princely Idris should fail to recognize himself in the miserable object there pourtrayed.  My tattered dress was that in which I had crawled half alive from the tempestuous sea.  My long and tangled hair hung in elf locks on my brow—­my dark eyes, now hollow and wild, gleamed from under them—­my cheeks were discoloured by the jaundice, which (the effect of misery and neglect) suffused my skin, and were half hid by a beard of many days’ growth.

Yet why should I not remain thus, I thought; the world is dead, and this squalid attire is a fitter mourning garb than the foppery of a black suit.  And thus, methinks, I should have remained, had not hope, without which I do not believe man could exist, whispered to me, that, in such a plight, I should be an object of fear and aversion to the being, preserved I knew not where, but I fondly trusted, at length, to be