When I had gone through this work, I was extremely delighted with it.  The boat was really much bigger than ever I saw a canoe or periagua, that was made of one tree, in my life.  Many a weary stroke it had cost, you may be sure; and there remained nothing but to get it into the water; which, had I accomplished, I make no question but I should have begun the maddest voyage, and the most unlikely to be performed, that ever was undertaken.

But all my devices to get it into the water failed me; though they cost me inexpressible labour too.  It lay about one hundred yards from the water, and not more; but the first inconvenience was, it was up hill towards the creek.  Well, to take away this discouragement, I resolved to dig into the surface of the earth, and so make a declivity:  this I begun, and it cost me a prodigious deal of pains; (but who grudge pains that have their deliverance in view?) when this was worked through, and this difficulty managed, it was still much the same, for I could no more stir the canoe than I could the other boat.  Then I measured the distance of ground, and resolved to cut a dock or canal, to bring the water up to the canoe, seeing I could not bring the canoe down to the water.  Well, I began this work; and when I began to enter upon it, and calculate how deep it was to be dug, how broad, how the stuff was to be thrown out, I found by the number of hands I had, having none but my own, that it must have been ten or twelve years before I could have gone through with it; for the shore lay so high, that at the upper end it must have been at least twenty feet deep; this attempt, though with great reluctancy, I was at length obliged to give over also.

This grieved me heartily; and now I saw, though too late, the folly of beginning a work before we count the cost, and before we judge rightly of our own strength to go through with it.

In the middle of this work, I finished my fourth year in this place, and kept my anniversary with the same devotion, and with as much comfort as before; for, by a constant study and serious application to the word of God, and by the assistance of his grace, I gained a different knowledge from what I had before; I entertained different notions of things; I looked now upon the world as a thing remote, which I had nothing to do with, no expectation from, and, indeed, no desires about:  in a word, I had nothing to do with it, nor was ever likely to have; I thought it looked, as we may perhaps look upon it hereafter, viz. as, a place I had lived in, but was come out of it; and well might I say, as father Abraham to Dives, “Between me and thee is a great gulf fixed.”