farther up the defile, ready for a second attack, if needed. But one is
usually sufficient; disordered, exhausted, bearing their wounded with
them, the soldiers retreat in panic, if permitted to escape at all, and
carry fresh dismay to the barracks, the plantations, and the Government
House.

It is not strange, then, that high military authorities, at that period,
should have pronounced the subjugation of the Maroons a thing more
difficult than to obtain a victory over any army in Europe. Moreover,
these people were fighting for their liberty, with which aim no form of
warfare seemed to them unjustifiable; and the description given by
Lafayette of the American Revolution was true of this one,--"the grandest
of causes, won by contests of sentinels and outposts." The utmost hope of
a British officer, ordered against the Maroons, was to lay waste a
provision-ground, or cut them off from water. But there was little
satisfaction in this: the wild-pine leaves and the grapevine-withes
supplied the rebels with water; and their plantation-grounds were the
wild pineapple and the plantain-groves, and the forests, where the wild
boars harbored, and the ringdoves were as easily shot as if they were
militiamen. Nothing but sheer weariness of fighting seems to have brought
about a truce at last, and then a treaty, between those high contracting
parties, Cudjoe and Gen. Williamson.

But how to execute a treaty between these wild Children of the Mist and
respectable diplomatic Englishmen? To establish any official relations
without the medium of a preliminary bullet, required some ingenuity of
manoeuvring. Cudjoe was willing, but inconveniently cautious: he would
not come halfway to meet any one; nothing would content him but an
interview in his own chosen cockpit. So he selected one of the most
difficult passes, posting in the forests a series of outlying parties, to