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JACK NEWLY CLOTHED.

I was ready to snatch the breeches out of her hands, and wondered that I should be such a fool never to think of buying me a pair of breeches before, that I might have a pocket to put my money in, and not carry it about two days together in my hand, and in my shoe, and I knew not how; so, in a word, I gave her two shillings for the breeches, and went over into the churchyard and put them on, put my money into my new pockets, and was as pleased as a prince is with his coach and six horses. I thanked the good woman, too, for the hat, and told her I would come again when I had got more money and buy some other things I wanted; and so I came away.

AN ADVENTURE IN THE AFRICAN DESERT.

[From "The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies of the famous Captain Singleton."]*

A

S we went forward, our whole caravan being in a body, our negroes, who were in the front, cried out that they saw a white man. We were not much surprised at first, it being, as we thought, a mistake of the fellows', and we asked them what they meant; when one of them stept up to me, and, pointing to a hut on the other side of the hill, I was astonished

to see a white man indeed, but stark naked, very busy near the door of his hut, and stooping down to the ground with something in his hand, as if he had been at some work; and his back being towards us, he did not see us.

*First edition, in 8vo, published at London in 1720.

22

AN UNEXPECTED DELIVERANCE.

I gave notice to our negroes to make no noise, and waited till some more of our men were come up, to show the sight to them, that they might be sure I was not mistaken, and we were soon satisfied of the truth; for the man, having heard some noise, started up, and looked full at us, as much surprised, to be sure, as we were, but whether with fear or hope we then knew not.

As he discovered us, so did the rest of the inhabitants belonging to the huts about him, and all crowded together, looking at us at a distance: a little bottom, in which the brook ran, lying between us, the white man, and all the rest, as he told us afterwards, not knowing well whether they should stay or run away however, it came presently into my thoughts that, if there were white men among them, it would be much easier for us to make them understand what we meant, as to peace or war, than we found it with others; so, tying a piece of white rag to the end of a stick, we sent two negroes with it to the bank of the water, carrying the pole up as high as they could. It was presently understood, and two of their men and the white man came to the shore on the other side.

However, as the white man spoke no Portuguese, they could understand nothing of one another, but by signs; but our men made the white man understand that they had white men with them too, at which, they said, the white man laughed. However, to be short, our men came back, and told us they were all good friends, and in about half an hour four of our men, two negroes, and the black prince, went to the river side, where the white man came to them.

They had not been half a quarter of an hour there till a negro came running to me, and told me the white man was Inglese, as he called him : upon which I ran back eagerly enough, you may be sure, with him, and found, as he said, that he was an Englishman; upon which he embraced me very passionately, the tears running down his face. The first surprise of his seeing us was over before we came, but any one may conceive it, by the brief account he gave us afterwards of his very unhappy circumstances, and of so unexpected a deliverance, such as perhaps never happened to any man in the world; for it was a million to one odds that ever he could have been relieved; nothing but an adventure that never was heard or read of before could have suited his case, unless Heaven, by some miracle that never was to be expected, had acted for him.

THE STRANGER IN THE DESERT.

23

He appeared to be a gentleman, not an ordinary-bred fellow, or labouring man. This showed itself in his behaviour in the first moment of our conversing with him, and in spite of all the disadvantages of his miserable circumstances.

He was a middle-aged man, not above thirty-seven or thirty-eight, though his beard was grown exceeding long, and the hair of his head and face strangely covered him to the middle of his back and breast. He was white, and his skin very fine, though discoloured, and in some places blistered, and covered with a brown, blackish substance, scurfy, scaly, and hard, which was the effect of the scorching heat of the sun; he was stark naked, and had been so, as he told us, upwards of two years.

He was so exceedingly transported at our meeting with him that he could scarce enter into any discourse at all with us for that day ; and when he could get away from us for a little, we saw him walking alone, and showing all the most extravagant tokens of an ungovernable joy; and even afterwards he was never without tears in his eyes for several days, upon the least word spoken by us of his circumstances, or by him of his deliverance.

We found his behaviour the most courteous and endearing I ever saw in any man whatever, and most evident tokens of a mannerly, well-bred person appeared in all things he did or said; and our people were exceedingly taken with him. He was a scholar and a mathematician; he could not speak Portuguese indeed, but he spoke Latin to our surgeon, French to another of our men, and Italian to a third.

He had no leisure in his thoughts to ask us whence we came, whither we were going, or who we were; but would have it always as an answer to himself, that, to be sure, wherever we were agoing, we came from heaven, and were sent on purpose to save him from the most wretched condition that ever man was reduced to.

Our men pitching their camp on the bank of a little river opposite to him, he began to inquire what store of provisions we had, and how we proposed to be supplied; when he found that our store was but small, he said he would talk with the natives, and we should have provisions enough; for he said they were the most courteous, good-natured part of the inhabitants in all that part of the country, as we might suppose from his living so safe among them.

1

24

A CURIOUS NARRATIVE.

The first things this gentleman did for us were indeed of the greatest consequence to us; for, first, he perfectly informed us where we were, and which was the properest course for us to steer; secondly, he put us in a way how to furnish ourselves effectually with provisions; and, thirdly, he was our complete interpreter and peace-maker with all the natives, who now began to be very numerous about us, and who were a more fierce and politic people than those we had met with before; not so easily terrified with our arms as those, and not so ignorant as to give their provisions and corn for our little toys, such, as I said before, as our artificer made; but, as they had frequently traded and conversed with the Europeans on the coast, or with other negro nations that had traded and been concerned with them, they were the less ignorant and the less fearful, and consequently nothing was to be had from them but by exchange for such things as they liked.

We now began to be more familiar with our new acquaintance; and first, though we made but a sorry figure as to clothes ourselves, having neither shoe nor stocking nor glove nor hat among us, and but very few shirts, yet as well as we could we clothed him; and first our surgeon, having scissors and razors, shaved him, and cut his hair; a hat, as I say, we had not in all our stores, but he supplied himself by making a cap of a piece of a leopard's skin, most artificially. As for shoes or stockings, he had gone so long without them, that he cared not even for the buskins and foot-gloves we wore, which I described above.

As he had been curious to hear the whole story of our travels, and was exceedingly delighted with the relation, so were we no less to know, and pleased with, the account of his circumstances, and the history of his coming to that strange place alone, and in that condition which we found him in, as above. This account of his would indeed be, in itself, the subject of an agreeable history, and would be as long and as diverting as our own, having in it many strange and extraordinary incidents; but we cannot have room here to launch out into so long a digression: the sum of his history was this.

He had been a factor for the English Guinea Company at Sierra Leone, or some other of their settlements which had been taken by the French, where he had been plundered of all his own effects, as well as of what was intrusted to him by the company. Whether it was that the company did not do him justice in restoring his circumstances, or in further employing him, he quitted their service, and was employed by those they called separate