hero's father to send his son immediately abroad for seven years;
and, which may seem somewhat remarkable, to his majesty's
plantations in America--that part of the world being, as he said,
freer from vices than the courts and cities of Europe, and
consequently less dangerous to corrupt a young man's morals. And
as for the advantages, the old gentleman thought they were equal
there with those attained in the politer climates; for travelling,
he said, was travelling in one part of the world as well as
another; it consisted in being such a time from home, and in
traversing so many leagues; and [he] appealed to experience
whether most of our travellers in France and Italy did not prove
at their return that they might have been sent as profitably to
Norway and Greenland.

According to these resolutions of his father, the young gentleman
went aboard a ship, and with a great deal of good company set out
for the American hemisphere. The exact time of his stay is
somewhat uncertain; most probably longer than was intended. But
howsoever long his abode there was, it must be a blank in this
history, as the whole story contains not one adventure worthy the
reader's notice; being indeed a continued scene of whoring,
drinking, and removing from one place to another.

To confess a truth, we are so ashamed of the shortness of this
chapter, that we would have done a violence to our history, and
have inserted an adventure or two of some other traveller; to
which purpose we borrowed the journals of several young gentlemen
who have lately made the tour of Europe; but to our great sorrow,
could not extract a single incident strong enough to justify the
theft to our conscience.