When, finding it to be a man’s:  and “who knows,” I cry’d out, “but this wretch’s wife, in some part of the world, secure at home, may expect his coming; or perhaps a son, ignorant of the fatal storm, may wait the wisht arrival of his father; who with so many kisses seal’d his unwilling parting:  These are our great designs! vain mortals swell with promising hopes, yet there’s the issue of them all! see the mighty nothing how it’s tost!”

When I had thus bemoan’d the wretch, as one unknown, the sea cast him on land with his face, not much disfigur’d, toward Heaven; upon which I made up to it, and easily knew that the but now terrible and implacable Lycas was lying at my feet.

I could not restrain my tears; but, beating my breast, “Now where’s,” said I, “your rage? where your unruly passions? now you’re expos’d a prey to fish and beasts; and the poor shipwrackt wretch, with all his boasted power, now has not one plank of the great ship he proudly call’d his own.  After this, let mortals flatter themselves with golden dreams, let the weary miser heap up ill-got wealth for many years; ’twas but yesterday this lifeless thing was priding in its riches, and had fixt the very day he thought to return.  How short, alas! eyes the poor wretch of his design! but ’tis not the sea only we should fear:  one the wars deceive; another by some accidental ruin, even at the altar, meets a grave; third by a fall in running anticipates his arrival to the goal; eating oft kills the greedy; and abstinence the temperate.  If we rightly consider it in this sea of life we may be shipwrackt every where; but we vainly lament the want of burial to a wretch that’s drowned; as if it concern’d the perishing carcass, whether flames, worms, or fishes were its cannibals.  Whatever way you are consum’d, the end of all ’s the same.  But fish, they object, will tear their bodies; as if their teeth were less gentle than the flames; a punishment that we believe is the highest we can inflict on slaves that have provok’d us; therefore what madness is ’t to trouble our lives with the cares of our burial after we’re dead; when the best of us may meet the fate he vainly strives with so much diligence to avoid?”

After these reflections, we perform’d the last office for the dead, and tho’ his enemies, honour’d him with a funeral pile; but while Eumolpus was making an epitaph, his eyes roam’d here and there, to find an image that might raise his fancy.

When we had willingly acquitted our selves of this piece of humanity to Lycas, we pursu’d our design’d journey, and all in a sweat soon. reacht the head of a neighbouring hill, from whence we discovered a town seated on the top of a high mountain; we did not know it, till a shepherd inform’d us ’twas Crotona; the most ancient and once most flourishing city of Italy; when we enquir’d of him what sort of people inhabited this renown’d place, and what kind of commerce they chiefly maintain’d, since they were impoverish’d by so many wars?