He took to the woods. But few of our readers can imagine the entanglements of the tropical forest through which he struggled. Conscious that blood-hounds might be put upon his track, he sought a running stream, and waded along for a great distance in the darkness. He was torn cruelly by overhanging thorns, and bruised as he stumbled over rocks and stones. As the morning dawned he hid himself in a pile of brush, half covered with water. The windings of the stream were such that he had advanced but a short distance from the town. The tidings of his escape roused the whole population. It was known that he could not have forced his way far through the entanglement of briers and thorns and interlacing vines, in the few hours between midnight and the dawn. The whole forest seemed alive with his pursuers. A thousand slaves were shouting in their barbarian eagerness. Packs of blood-hounds were rushing to and fro, smelling at every track, and making the forest resound with their deep-mouthed bayings. The alarm-bells of the city were rolling forth their loud and solemn peals. Bands of Spanish cavaliers, with indignation in their hearts and oaths upon their lips, passed within sight of the hiding wretch; and he heard their vows of vengeance. Thus passed the wretched day. “The way of the transgressor is indeed hard.” Barthelemy, bleeding, exhausted, starving and tormented with the bite of insects, endured these long hours of mental and bodily torture, until night again darkened the scene. With the darkness he resumed his terrified flight, he scarcely knew where. His general plan was to reach some distant seaport in disguise, where he hoped to effect his escape as a sailor. Every hour he trembled in danger of being caught, and his only food was roots and berries, and the raw shell-fish he scraped from the rocks. He forded streams where he was in imminent danger of being snapped up by the jaws of crocodiles. He waded through swamps, and narrowly escaped being suffocated in the mire. His shoes were torn from his feet, his clothes from his limbs. For fourteen days and nights he endured these tortures. His only guide was the roar of the ocean. He was travelling in a southwesterly direction. It was his constant endeavor to keep the ocean within hearing distance on his right. There is manifestly no tendency in misery to make men better. The pirate, with all his woes, grew more obdurate and more cruel. “In these fourteen days,” writes one of his biographers, “he must have literally tasted death and anticipated the horrors of hell.” But this almost demoniac wretchedness led him to no prayers of penitence, and to no promises of amendment. They served only to whet his appetite for revenge.