Page:Edgar Huntly, or The Sleep Walker.djvu/141

 against the accidents that might befall my person or my cargo in crossing the ocean.

"It was my fate to encounter the worst of these disasters. We were overtaken by a storm; my vessel was driven ashore on the coast of Portugal; my cargo was utterly lost; and the greater part of the crew and passengers were drowned: I was rescued from the same fate by some fishermen. In consequence of the hardships to which I had been exposed, having laboured for several days at the pumps, and spent the greater part of a winter night hanging from the rigging of the ship, and perpetually beaten by the waves, I contracted a severe disease, which bereaved me of the use of my limbs. The fishermen who rescued me, carried me to their huts; and there I remained three weeks helpless and miserable.

"That part of the coast on which I was thrown, was in the highest degree sterile and rude; its few inhabitants subsisted precariously on the produce of the ocean. Their dwellings were of mud, low, filthy, dark, and comfortless; their fuel was the stalks of shrubs, sparingly scattered over a sandy desert; their poverty scarcely allowed them salt and black bread with their fish, which was obtained in unequal and sometimes insufficient quantities, and which they eat with all its impurities and half cooked.

"My former habits as well as my present indisposition, required very different treatment from what the ignorance and penury of these people obliged them to bestow. I lay upon the moist earth, imperfectly sheltered from the sky, and with neither raiment nor fire to keep me warm. My hosts had little attention or compassion to spare to the wants of others. They could not remove me to a more hospitable district; and here, without doubt, I should have perished, had not a monk chanced to visit their hovels. He belonged to a convent of St. Jago, some leagues farther from the shore, who used to send one of its members annually to inspect the religious concerns of these outcasts. Happily this was the period of their visitations.

"My abode in Spain had made me somewhat conversant with its language: the dialect of this monk did not so much differ from Castilian but that, with the assistance of Latin,