gradually checked the plunder of plantations, destroyed villages and
planting-grounds, and drove the rebels, for the time at least, into the
deeper recesses of the woods, or into the adjacent province of Cayenne.
They had the slight satisfaction of burning Bonny's own house, a
two-story wooden hut, built in the fashion of our frontier guardhouses.
They often took single prisoners,--some child, born and bred in the
woods, and frightened equally by the first sight of a white man and of a
cow,--or some warrior, who, on being threatened with torture, stretched
forth both hands in disdain, and said, with Indian eloquence, "These
hands have made tigers tremble." As for Stedman, he still went
barefooted, still quarrelled with his colonel, still sketched the scenery
and described the reptiles, still reared greegree worms for his private
kitchen, still quoted good poetry and wrote execrable, still pitied all
the sufferers around him, black, white, and red, until finally he and his
comrades were ordered back to Holland in 1776.

Among all that wasted regiment of weary and broken-down men, there was
probably no one but Stedman who looked backward with longing as they
sailed down the lovely Surinam. True, he bore all his precious
collections with him,--parrots and butterflies, drawings on the backs of
old letters, and journals kept on bones and cartridges. But he had left
behind him a dearer treasure; for there runs through all his eccentric
narrative a single thread of pure romance, in his love for his beautiful
quadroon wife and his only son.

Within a month after his arrival in the colony, our susceptible ensign
first saw Joanna, a slave-girl of fifteen, at the house of an intimate
friend. Her extreme beauty and modesty first fascinated him, and then her
piteous narrative,--for she was the daughter of a planter, who had just
gone mad and died in despair from the discovery that he could not legally