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, baize, 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 neighbour, I mean in the
advancement of my plantation; for the first thing I did, I bought me a
Negro slave, and an 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
neighbours; and these fifty rolls, being each of above a hundred weight,
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; but other things
attended me, and I was still to be the wilful 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