Romances and narratives Author:Daniel Defoe Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter ij, An Essay upon Honesty. WHEN I first came home to my own country, and began to sit down and look back upon the past circumstances of my wandering ... more »state, as you will in charity suppose I could not but do very often, the very prosperity I enjoyed led me most naturally to reflect upon the particular steps by which I arrived to it. The condition I was in was very happy, speaking of human felicity; the former captivity I had suffered made my liberty sweeter to me; and to find myself jumped into easy circumstances at once, from a condition below the common rate of life, made it still sweeter. One time as I was upon my inquiries into the happy concurrence of the causes which had brought the event of my prosperity to pass, as an effect, it occurred to my thoughts how much of it all depended, under the disposition of Providence, upon the principle of honesty which I met with in almost all the people whom it was my lot to be concerned with in my private and particular affairs; and I that had met with such extraordinary instances of the knavery and villainy of men's natures in other circumstances, could not but be something taken up with the miracles of honesty that I had met with among the several people I had had to do with, I mean, those whom I had more particularly to do with in the articles of my liberty, estate, or effects, which fell into their hands. I began with my most trusty and faithful widow, the captain's wife with whom I first went to the coast of Africa, and to whom I entrusted "2OO, being the gain I had made in my first adventures to Guinea, as in the first volume, page 18, appears. She was left a widow, and in but indifferent circumstances ; but when I sent to her so far off as the Brazils, where I was in such a condition as she might have reasonably...« less