Page:An English Garner Ingatherings from Our History and Literature (Volume 1 1877).pdf/360

 my ague came upon me, I used to make a fire; wood costing nothing but the fetching.

We had a black boy [? a Madrassee] that my father brought from Porto Nova to attend upon him: who seeing his master to be a prisoner in the hands of the people of his complexion, would not now obey his command further than what agreed unto his own humour: neither was it then, as we thought, in our power to compel or make him; but that was our ignorance.

As for me, my ague now came to a settled course, that is, once in three days, and so continued for sixteen months' time.

There appearing now to us no probability, whereupon to build any hopes of liberty: the sense of it struck my father into such an agony and strong passion of grief that once, I well remember, in nine days' time nothing came into his mouth but cold water; neither did he in three months together, ever rise up out of his bed but when the course of nature required it: always groaning and sighing in a most piteous manner, which for me to hear and see come from my dear father, myself also in the same condition, did almost break my heart. But then I felt that doctrine most true, which I had read out of Master ROGERS's book, "That GOD is most sweet; when the world is most bitter."

In this manner my father lay until the 9th of February 1661: by which time he was consumed to an anatomy [reduced to a skeleton], having nothing left but skin to cover his bones. Yet he would often say, "that the very sound of liberty would so revive him, that it would put strength into his limbs." But it was not the will of Him, to whom we say "Thy will be done" to have it so.

The evening before his death, he called me to come near his bedside, and to sit down by him; at which time I had also a strong fever upon me. This done, he told me, "That he sensibly felt his life departing from him, and was assured that this night GOD would deliver him out of his captivity: and that he never thought, in all his lifetime, that death could be so easy and welcome to any man as GOD had made it to be to him, and the joys he now felt in himself he wanted utterance to express to me." He told me "These were the last words that ever he should speak to me, and bade me well to regard and to be sure to remember them, and tell them to my