they had on the sympathetic and ingenious Mrs. Cowley,"--the "Narrative
of a Five Years' Expedition" closes.

The war, which had cost the government forty thousand pounds a year, was
ended, and left both parties essentially as when it began. The Maroons
gradually returned to their old abodes, and, being unmolested themselves,
left others unmolested thenceforward. Originally three thousand,--in
Stedman's time, fifteen thousand,--they were estimated at seventy
thousand by Capt. Alexander, who saw Guiana in 1831; and a later American
scientific expedition, having visited them in their homes, reported them
as still enjoying their wild freedom, and multiplying, while the Indians
on the same soil decay. The beautiful forests of Surinam still make the
morning gorgeous with their beauty, and the night deadly with their
chill; the stately palm still rears, a hundred feet in air, its straight
gray shaft and its head of verdure; the mora builds its solid, buttressed
trunk, a pedestal for the eagle; the pine of the tropics holds out its
myriad hands with water-cups for the rain and dews, where all the birds
and the monkeys may drink their fill; the trees are garlanded with
epiphytes and convolvuli, and anchored to the earth by a thousand vines.
High among their branches, the red and yellow mocking-birds still build
their hanging nests, uncouth storks and tree-porcupines cling above, and
the spotted deer and the tapir drink from the sluggish stream below. The
night is still made noisy with a thousand cries of bird and beast; and
the stillness of the sultry noon is broken by the slow tolling of the
_campanero_, or bell-bird, far in the deep, dark woods, like the chime of
some lost convent. And as Nature is unchanged there, so apparently is
man; the Maroons still retain their savage freedom, still shoot their
wild game and trap their fish, still raise their rice and cassava, yams
and plantains,--still make cups from the gourd-tree and hammocks from the
silk-grass plant, wine from the palm-tree's sap, brooms from its leaves,