_Mr. Forester._ Positively. Some presumptuous naturalists have refused his species the honours of humanity; but the most enlightened and illustrious philosophers agree in considering him in his true light as the natural and original man.[8] One French philosopher, indeed, has been guilty of an inaccuracy, in considering him as a degenerated man;[9] degenerated he cannot be; as his prodigious physical strength, his uninterrupted health, and his amiable simplicity of manners demonstrate. He is, as I have said, a specimen of the natural and original man—a genuine facsimile of the philosophical Adam. He was caught by an intelligent negro very young, in the woods of Angola; and his gentleness and sweet temper[10] winning the hearts of the negro and negress, they brought him up in their cottage as the playfellow of their little boys and girls, where, with the exception of speech, he acquired the practice of such of the simpler arts of life as the degree of civilisation in that part of Africa admits. In this way he lived till he was about seventeen years of age—— _Sir Telegraph Paxarett._ By his own reckoning? _Mr. Forester._ By analogical computation. At this period, my old friend Captain Hawltaught of the Tornado frigate, being driven by stress of weather to the coast of Angola, was so much struck with the contemplative cast of Sir Oran’s countenance,[11] that he offered the negro an irresistible bribe to surrender him to his possession. The negro brought him on board, and took an opportunity to leave him slily, but with infinite reluctance and sympathetic grief. When the ship weighed anchor, and Sir Oran found himself separated from the friends of his youth, and surrounded with strange faces, he wept bitterly,[12] and fell into such deep grief that his life was despaired of.[13] The surgeon of the ship did what he could for him; and a much better doctor, Time, completed his cure. By degrees a very warm friendship for my friend Captain Hawltaught extinguished his recollection of his negro friends. Three years they cruised together in the Tornado, when a dangerous wound compelled the old captain to renounce his darling element, and lay himself up in ordinary for the rest of his days. He retired on his half-pay and the produce of his prize-money to a little village in the West of England, where he employed himself very assiduously in planting cabbages and watching the changes of the wind. Mr. Oran, as he was then called, was his inseparable companion, and became a very expert practical gardener. The old captain used to observe, he could always say he had an honest man in his house, which was more than could be said of many honourable houses where there was much vapouring about honour.