ramble one way, sometimes another; and I believe verity, if I had had
the boat that I went from Sallee in, I should have ventured to sea,
bound any where, I knew not whither.

I have been, in all my circumstances, a memento to those who are touched
with that general plague of mankind, whence, for aught I know, one half
of their miseries flow; I mean, that of not being satisfied with the
station wherein God and nature hath placed them; for, not to look back
upon my primitive condition, and the excellent advice of my father, the
opposition to which was, as I may call it, my original sin, my
subsequent mistakes of the same kind have been the means of my coming
into this miserable condition; for had that Providence, which so happily
had seated me at the Brasils as a planter, blessed me with confined
desires, and could I have been contented to have gone on gradually, I
might have been by this time, I mean in the time of my being on this
island, one of the most considerable planters in the Brasils; nay, I am
persuaded, that by the improvements I had made in that little time I
lived there, and the increase I should probably have made if I had
stayed, I might have been worth a hundred thousand moidores; and what
business had I to leave a settled fortune, well-stocked plantation,
improving and increasing, to turn supercargo to Guinea, to fetch
Negroes, when patience and time would have so increased our stock at
home, that we could have bought them at our own doors, from those whose
business it was to fetch them? And though it had cost us something more,
yet the difference of that price was by no means worth saving at so
great a hazard.

But as this is ordinarily the fate of young heads, so reflection upon
the folly of it is as ordinarily the exercise of more years, or of the
dear-bought experience of time; and so it was with me now; and yet, so