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I 
142 THE AMAZON AND MADEIRA RIVERS. 
I 
j a well-armed escort, of twenty men, with a sergeant or cabo, Thongh 
I this seemed to look rather suspicious, the now apostle to the heathen 
I was humoured, and he betook himself to his post of danger, relyijig 
1 for liis security on his lofty mission and liis bayonets. IX^othing 
apparently had taken jjlace there from the date of the last attack ; 
tile blackened posts, which once had suiiportcd the light palm-roof 
of a happy family, pointing sadly to the sky, and around the devastated I 
niantlioca plantation the silent density of the forest uninvaded by the 
trace of either friend or foe. It would require one to have felt all the 
heart-sickening loneliness, all the dreary melancholy of such a desolate 
place, to understand thoroughly the thoughts Avhich must have then 
I assailed the poor Erother, and how, not quite prepared to become a 
martyr, and with a secret yearning for the didl cell he had left 
behind him in the convent, he must have stealthily examined his ' 
shin-bones at night to see that they wore there all right. 
But an Italian friar has ingenious brains; and had not he con- 
sidered and studied, theoretically at least, all the difficulties a modern i 
missionary has to encounter in the Old and New World, even before ! 
he had left his convent at Genoa ? Besides, he had twenty stout negro 
and mulatto boys behind him; and he thought it best to make the 
: most of them, and to reserve for himself the supreme finishing-stroke, 
such as the christening of the subdued chieftain, with all his family 
i or even all his ti-ibe. So the cabo, with six men, was ordered to 
ascend a small affluent of the Eio Negro, whose shores gave signs 
of being peopled by the expected Indians, and, as an introductory 
measure of conciliation, to leave there some of the presents. The 
sergeant, who probably saw his way somewhat more clearly than his 
holy master, was lucky enough to discover near the mouth of the little 
river the opening of a narrow Indian path ; and there he himg up his 
beads, scissors, &c., on the surrounding bushes, as if they were German 
Christmas-trees. On the next day he returned to fetch his answer; 
and he got it ; but in the unexpected shape of a thick hail of arrows 
showering from out the very bushes whereon Iris presents were still 
suspended. Luckily the ungrateful way layers had taken aim too hastily ; 
the sergeant and his men leaped out of the boat, and screening them- i 
selves behind it as with a shield, drifted slowly down the river to 
Avhere the Fratcr waited impatiently for them. The holy man had 
not even the satisfaction of curing a Avound got in the strife, and had 
