Page:Olney Hymns - 1840.djvu/13

 hastily broiled, or rather half burned, without sauce, salt, or bread, has afforded me a delicious meal. If I caught none, I might, if I could, sleep away my hunger till the next return of slack water, and then try again. Nor did I suffer less from the inclemency of the weather and the want of clothes. The rainy season was now advancing; my whole suit was a shirt, a pair of trowsers, a cotton handkerchief instead of a cap, and a cotton cloth about two yards long to supply the want of upper garments; and thus accoutred I have been exposed for twenty, thirty, perhaps nearly forty hours together, in incessant rain, accompanied with strong gales of wind, without the least shelter, when my master was on shore. I feel to this day some faint returns of the violent pains I then contracted. The excessive cold and wet I endured in that voyage, and soon after I had recovered from a long sickness, quite broke my constitution and my spirits. The latter were soon restored; but the effects of the former still remain with me, as a needful memento of the service and the wages of sin."

One circumstance more from his revolting narrative must be quoted here, to consummate the picture of his personal distresses, and to introduce the reader of this sketch to a knowledge of the far-surpassing debasement of his enslaved, abandoned, and infatuated mind. He says to his friend and correspondent, in after life,— "Had you seen me, then, go pensive and solitary, in the dead of the night, to wash my one shirt upon the rocks, and afterwards put it on wet, that it might dry upon my back while I slept; had you seen me so poor a figure that, when a boat's crew came to the island, shame often constrained me to hide myself in the woods, from the sight of strangers; —especially had you known that my conduct, prin-