suaded them to
hasten on to his own village. Dickenson, suspecting foul play as usual,
insisted on going to Santa Lucia. There, the Indian told him, they would
meet fierce savages and undoubtedly have their throats cut, which kindly
warning was quite enough to drive the Quaker to Santa Lucia headlong. He
was sure of the worst designs on the part of the cannibal, from a
strange glance which he fixed upon the baby as he drove them before him
to his village, saying with a treacherous laugh, that after they had
gone there for a purpose he had, they might go to Santa Lucia as they
would.

It was a bleak, chilly afternoon as they toiled mile after mile along
the beach, the Quaker woman far behind the others with her baby in her
arms, carrying it, as she thought, to its death. Overhead, flocks of
dark-winged grakles swooped across the lowering sky, uttering from time
to time their harsh, foreboding cry; shoreward, as far as the eye could
see, the sand stretched in interminable yellow ridges, blackened here
and there by tufts of dead palmetto-trees; while on the other side the
sea had wrapped itself in a threatening silence and darkness. A line of
white foam crept out of it from horizon to horizon, dumb and treacherous,
and licked the mother's feet as she dragged herself heavily after the
others.

From time to time the Indian stealthily peered over her shoulder,
looking at the child's thin face as it slept upon her breast. As evening
closed in, they came to a broad arm of the sea thrust inland through the
beach, and halted at the edge. Beyond it, in the darkness, they could
distinguish the yet darker shapes of the wigwams, and savages gathered
about two or three enormous fires that threw long red lines of glare
into the sea-fog. "As we stood there for many Hour's Time," says
Jonathan Dickenson, "we were assured these Dreadful Fires were prepared
for us."

Of all the sad little company that stand out against the far-off dimness
of the past, in that long watch upon the beach, the low-voiced,
sweet-tempered Quaker lady comes nearest and is the most real to us. The
sailors had chosen a life of peril years ago; her husband, with all his
suspicious bigotry, had, when pushed to extremes, an admirable tough
courage with which to face the dangers of sea and night and death; and
the white-headed old man, who stood apart and calm, had received, as
much as Elijah of old, a Divine word to speak in the wilderness, and the
life in it woul