280

HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

CHAP.

XXIV.

1090 -

T/" •• '

little more than four months, although the healthiestmonths of the year, three hundred men out of thirteenhundred had been swept away by disease. Of the survivorsvery few lived to see tlieir native country again. Two ofthe ships perished at sea. Many of the adventurers, whohad left their homes flushed with hopes of speedy opulence,were glad to hire themselves out to the planters of Jamaica,and laid their bones in that land of exile. Shields diedthere, worn out and heart broken. Borland was the onlyminister who came back. In his curious and interestingnarrative, he expresses his feelings, after the fashion ofthe school in which he had been bred, by grotesque al-lusions to the Old Testament, and by a profusion of Hebrewwords. On his first arrival, he tells us, he found NewEdinburgh a Ziklag. He had subsequently been com-pelled to dwell in the tents of Kedar. Once, indeed, duringhis sojourn, he had fallen in with a Beer-laliai-roi, andhad set up his Ebenezer: but in general Darien wasto him a Magor Missabib, a Kibrothhattaavah. Thesad story is introduced with the words in which agreat man of old, delivered over to the malice of theEvil Power, was informed of the death of his childrenand of the ruin of his fortunes: “I alone am escaped totell thee.”

END OP TOD. IX.

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