the heights above flash
with musketry, while the precipitous path by which they came seems to
close in fire behind them. By the time the troops have formed in some
attempt at military order, the woods around them are empty, and their
agile and noiseless foes have settled themselves into ambush again,
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 could be 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 pine-apple and the plantain groves, and the forests, where the
wild-boars harbored and the ringdoves were as easily shot as if they
were militia-men. 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 General 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 half-way 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 signal with their horns, one by one, the approach of the
plenipotentiaries, and then to retire on the main body. Through this
line of perilous signals, therefore, Colonel Guthrie and his handful of
men bravely advanced; horn after horn they heard sounded, but there was
no oth