Mr. Eternity Read Free

were young in the orphan house however I believe the pictures was faked. How could you fake a picture he said it is a picture. They could find a way I said. No he said it can’t be done.
    I didn’t listen to him I thought he were a fool. You will see I had got it wrong he were no fool for example it were him taught me to write. Anyway there you have it that were how I come to leave home at the age of eighteen or nineteen years.

1750
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    I have liv’d upon this Nauseous Orb the Earth for near seventie years, and to-day, the principal actors in my life’s Drama being dead (except I imagine Dr. Dan Defoe who will outlive us all), and accordingly unable, if I judge rightly the termes & conditions of the Afterlife , to bring a Suit against me, I perceive the time is ripe to tell the adventures and misventures of my life, for tho I am now Resident in Boston, city of snows and fogs, yet my memory capers among the palmy green islands of youth.
    I shall tell my story from front to back – I shall pour it out scum and sediment and all – for it wants nothing, and requires nothing of the Artificers Art . I was born in the Barbados, and there I was inured to hardship and cruel treatment, but in the year 1750, when I was a young man of nineteen years, I fled from there to the Bahama islands and sought to raise myself by an audacious deception, as I will shortly explain.
    In the Bahamas I traveled from one house to the next, the guest of all, and from one island to the next, pass’d as it were from hand to hand among the debased gentry of that piratical country, who were all of them second sons & bastard sons & spalpeens and barrowers raised to the peerage, and I received as hearty a welcome as ever I could have wished. One day I came to stop with Mr. Galsworthy of Babylon plantation, upon an island called Little Salt. As it was then after noon, and his custom to feed without stint or measure each day at two o’clock, or three, I dress’d quickly in the best of what I had and came down to meet my host at the table, including many other guests. It was here I spied for the first time Daniel Defoe, whom they call’d the Spaynard, an old man like a hat-stand with eyes, or a scarecrow totteringly put together, or a jointed insect in a wig, acclaim’d by popular belief to be near three hundred years of age.
    The great house at Babylon was poorly constructed, & in grate haste, namely that some rooms were walled with grave markers, and others with a kind of white washed dung. I think this were not for want of credit or capital, but only that Mr. Galsworthy did so enjoy a sumptuous table that his only thought was for feasting, and all the rest were bagatelles and trifles. In this he was like the man who gambles his estate for a thrill, or sells the cloathes off his back for the taste and quickness of wine. To-day we dined upon stew’d mudfish, pickled crabs, roast pig, roast yam, plantanes, boil’d pudding, roast coot, water milions, and many other fuds viz. doves ducks & fishes. For my part I worked at a ham the size of a cloak-bag.
    Yet soon our revelry was interrupted by the visitation of brooding death. One of the guests, a Mr. Foster, gave a small scream and, stiff and benumb’d, though also it seemed in excruciating pain, endeavored to rise, which task being impossible he next grobled about for whatever chanced to be within his reach, snatching the wig from his companion’s head, and then, giving another scream, slipped forward dead with his face in his fud. We now all gazed about uncertain what to do, for if Mr. Foster had been poisoned, as it did appear he had been (which was not unusual in the Bahamas at that time, where the slaves did frequently season their masters fud with corrosive sublimate), then I expected our next concern would be to torment slave after slave until we had learnt the culprits. Daniel Defoe no doubt thought as I did, and not wishing to see this feast spoilt, for it was a good one, nor indeed any