all other terms, Laudonniere yielded, released the chief, and received in his place two hostages, who were fast bound in the boats.  Ottigny and Arlac, with a strong detachment of arquebusiers, set forth to receive the promised supplies, for which, from the first, full payment in merchandise had been offered.  Arrived at the village, they filed into the great central lodge, within whose dusky precincts were gathered the magnates of the tribe.  Council-chamber, forum, banquet-hall, dancing-hall, palace, all in one, the royal dwelling could hold half the population in its capacious confines.  Here the French made their abode.  Their armor buckled, their arquebuse-matches lighted, they stood, or sat, or reclined on the earthen floor, with anxious eyes watching the strange, dim scene, half lighted by the daylight that streamed down through the hole at the apex of the roof.  Tall, dark forms stalked to and fro, quivers at their backs, bows and arrows in their hands, while groups, crouched in the shadow beyond, eyed the hated guests with inscrutable visages, and malignant, sidelong eyes.  Corn came in slowly, but warriors were mustering fast.  The village without was full of them.  The French officers grew anxious, and urged the chiefs to greater alacrity in collecting the promised ransom.  The answer boded no good, “Our women are afraid, when they see the matches of your guns burning.  Put them out, and they will bring the corn faster.”

Outina was nowhere to be seen.  At length they learned that he was in one of the small huts adjacent.  Several of the officers went to him, complaining of the slow payment of his ransom.  The kindness of his captors at Fort Caroline seemed to have won his heart.  He replied, that such was the rage of his subjects that he could no longer control them,—­that the French were in danger,—­and that he had seen arrows stuck in the ground by the side of the path, in token that war was declared.  Their peril was thickening hourly, and Ottigny resolved to regain the boats while there was yet time.

On the twenty-seventh of July, at nine in the morning, he set his men in order.  Each shouldering a sack of corn, they marched through the rows of squalid huts that surrounded the great lodge, and out betwixt the interfolding extremities of the palisade that encircled the town.  Before them stretched a wide avenue, three or four hundred paces long, flanked by a natural growth of trees,—­one of those curious monuments of native industry to which allusion has been already made.  Here Ottigny halted and formed his line of march.  Arlac with eight matchlockmen was sent in advance, and flanking parties thrown into the woods on either side.  Ottigny told his soldiers, that, if the Indians meant to attack them, they were probably in ambush at the other end of the avenue.  He was right.  As Arlac’s party reached the spot, the whole pack gave tongue at once.  The war-whoop quavered through the startled air, and a tempest of stone-headed arrows clattered against the breastplates of the French, or tore, scorching like fire, through their unprotected limbs.  They stood firm, and sent back their shot so steadily that several of the assailants were laid dead, and the rest, two or three hundred in number, gave way as Ottigny came up with his men.