march of several days,--during which Bressani, in wading a rocky
stream, fell from exhaustion and was nearly drowned,--they reached
an Iroquois town. It is needless to follow the revolting details
of the new torments that succeeded. They hung him by the feet
with chains; placed food for their dogs on his naked body, that
they might lacerate him as they ate; and at last had reduced his
emaciated frame to such a condition that even they themselves stood
in horror of him. "I could not have believed," he writes to his
Superior, "that a man was so hard to kill." He found among them
those who, from compassion or from a refinement of cruelty, fed
him, for he could not feed himself. They told him jestingly that
they wished to fatten him before putting him to death.
The council that was to decide his fate met on the nineteenth of
June, when to the prisoner's amazement, and, as it seemed, to their
own surprise, they resolved to spare his life. He was given, with
due ceremony, to an old woman, to take the place of a deceased
relative; but since he was as repulsive, in his mangled condition
as, by the Indian standard, he was useless, she sent her son
with him to Fort Orange, to sell him to the Dutch. With the same
humanity which they had shown in the case of Jogues, they gave a
generous ransom for him, supplied him with clothing, kept him until
his strength was in some degree recruited, and then placed him on
board a vessel bound for Rochelle. Here he