They had the slight satisfaction of burning Bonny's own house, a
two-story wooden hut, built in the fashion of our frontier
guard-houses. 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 bare-footed, still quarrelled with his colonel, still
sketched the scenery and described the reptiles, still reared gree-gree
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.
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