"Children's Books - Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Children's Books)

When this cargo arrived, I thought my fortune made, for I was
surprised with joy of it; and my good steward, the captain, had laid
out the five pounds, which my friend had sent him for a present for
himself, to purchase and bring me over a servant under bond for six
years' service, and would not accept of any consideration, except a
little tobacco, which I would have him accept, being of my own
produce.
Neither was this all; but my goods being all English manufactures
such as cloth, stuffs, baise, and things particularly valuable and
desirable in the country, I found means to sell them to a very great
advantage; so that I may say I had more than four times the value of
my first cargo, and was now infinitely beyond my poor neighbor, I mean
in the advancement of my plantation; for the first thing I did, I
bought me a negro slave, and a European servant also; I mean another
besides that which the captain brought me from Lisbon.
But as abused prosperity is oftentimes made the very means of our
greatest adversity, so was it with me. I went on the next year with
great success in my plantation. I raised fifty great rolls of
tobacco on my own ground, more than I had disposed of for
necessaries among my neighbors; and these fifty rolls, being each of a
hundredweight, were well cured, and laid by against the return of
the fleet from Lisbon. And now, increasing in business and in
wealth, my head began to be full of projects and undertakings beyond
my reach, such as are, indeed, often the ruin of the best heads in
business.
Had I continued in the station I was now in, I had room for all
the happy things to have yet befallen me for which my father so
earnestly recommended a quiet, retired life, and of which he had so
sensibly described the middle station of life to be full of. But other
things attended me, and I was still to be the willful agent of all
my own miseries; and particularly to increase my fault and double
the reflections upon myself, which in my future sorrows I should
have leisure to make. All these miscarriages were procured by my
apparent obstinate adhering to my foolish inclination of wandering
abroad, and pursuing that inclination in contradiction to the clearest
views of doing myself good in a fair and plain pursuit of those
prospects, and those measures of life, which Nature and Providence
concurred to present me with, and to make my duty.
As I had once done thus in my breaking away from my parents, so I
could not be content now, but I must go and leave the happy view I had
of being a rich and thriving man in my new plantation, only to
pursue a rash and immoderate desire of rising faster than the nature
of the thing admitted; and thus I cast myself down again into the
deepest gulf of human misery that ever man fell into, or perhaps could
be consistent with life and a state of health in the world.
To come, then, by the just degrees to the particulars of this part
of my story. You may suppose, that having now lived almost four
years in the Brazils, and beginning to thrive and prosper very well
upon my plantation, I had not only learned the language, but had
contracted acquaintance and friendship among my fellow-planters, as