to fight the English while he had a man left. Before
we reached the fort, we understood that many of the Pindarees had
accepted the offers of the government; numbers had been cut up, and
others had flown to their homes, many of them in our provinces. Nothing
but small parties could be heard of, and these sought refuge in the
woods by day, and travelled towards their homes under cover of the
night. Passing over numberless little skirmishes, marches, and
countermarches, that would be tedious to detail, I shall leave the other
divisions of the army to pursue the Pindarees, and proceed to relate the
operations of that division with which my personal services stand
connected; previous to which, however, a brief sketch of the character
and mode of life of a Pindaree may not be unacceptable.

This predatory wanderer of the East, from the moment of his birth is
nursed in the lap of depravity, and is nurtured and fondled in a bosom
inured to cruelties and barbarities that would disgrace the wild savage
of the interior of benighted Africa. His sire, perhaps, a short moment
ere his birth, has imbrued his hands in the blood of innocence, or
buried his spear in the bosom of some infant virgin who would not
passively submit to his sensual embraces; and, peradventure, bears in
his hand some gold or silver ornament torn from her before unpolluted
bosom, with which he decks the body of his new-born babe. Should the
little urchin be permitted to live, he is schooled in the camp of
heartless assassins, mounted on horseback, and well instructed in the
system of plunder. Scarcely can the boy lisp his parent's name, ere he
is bedizened with his father's spoils. It often happens, however, that
these children are not permitted to trouble their parents long,
especially should they prove sickly or cross, in which case the father
makes little scruple of dispatching them outright. Indeed, by less cruel
parents these poor babes are thought but incumbrances to a flying and
marauding force, whose motto is rapine, where the arm of resistance dare
be put forth. When the boy attains five or six years of age, he bears
the blood-stained weapons of his calling, and is schooled in all the
intricacy and minutiae of their predatory line of life. At the age of
from ten to fourteen, he will be found a proficient in all the cruelties
which are considered requisite qualities for his profession; and,
perhaps, ere he has completed his sixteenth year, rapine and murd