as many stakes,
one for each apostle and one for the Saviour, and then to make a
burnt-offering of them. Others were smeared with pitch and lighted.
Sometimes a fugitive who had been recaptured was sent into the forest
with his severed hand,--"Go, carry this letter to the others who have
escaped, with our compliments."

"I have seen," says Las Casas, "five chiefs and several other Indians
roasting together upon hurdles, and the Spanish captain was enraged
because their cries disturbed his _siesta_. He ordered them to be
strangled, that he might hear no more of it. But the superintendent,
whom I know, as well as his family, which is from Seville, more cruel
than the officer, refused to end their torture." He would not be
cheated of his after-dinner luxury, so he gagged them with sticks, and
replenished the fires.[T]

[Footnote T: Llorente's _Oeuvres de Las Casas; Premiere Memoire,
contenant la Relation des Cruautes_, etc.]

Columbus first made use of dogs against the Indians, but merely to
intimidate. They were swift dogs of chase, impetuous and dangerous, but
did not yet deserve to be called blood-hounds. The Spaniards, however,
by frequently using them in the pursuit of escaping natives, without
thinking it worth while to restrain their motions, gradually educated
them to a taste for human blood. From the breed, thus modified, the
West-Indian blood-hound descended, possibly not without admixture with
other savage dogs of French and English breeds which were brought to the
island by their scarcely less savage owners. Many of the dogs which the
Spaniards carried to South America roamed at large and degenerated into
beasts of prey. Soldiers at one time were detailed to hunt them, and
were then nicknamed _Mataperros_, or dog-slayers.

But if the dogs fed upon the Indian's body, the monk was ever vigilant
to save his soul. A woman was holding her child of twelve months, says
Las Casas, when she perceived the approach of the hounds in full cry
after a party of natives. Feeling that she could not escape, she
instantly tied her babe to her leg and then suspended herself from a
beam. The dogs came up at the moment that a monk was baptizing the
child, thus luckily cutting off its purgatory just behind the jaws that
devoured it.

Spaniards were known to feed their dogs, when short of meat, by chopping
off a native's arm and throwing it to them; and a few fed their dogs
exclusively upon native-meat. We have the authority of