revival style; a malady which, in civilised
countries at least, should be met by the most prompt
and liberal use of the parish fire-engine, shaving
the head, large blisters, and half-pint doses of
black draught. These ladies get up religious
meetings, which the men are not allowed to
come near. Mr. du Chaillu says he ventured on
one of these occasions to look into their temple, a
miserable hut sacred to these infernal rites, and
beheld three naked old hags sitting on a clay
floor, with a great heap of greegrees, which they
seemed to be silently adoring. He had to beat
a hasty retreat to save himself from being torn
to pieces by a mob of women, and only the
threat of using his revolver kept them off.
At this ceremony the women painted their faces,
and made even a more diabolical uproar than the
men. Another time he went to see a negro friend,
who had just died. His late acquaintance was
seated in a chair, clothed in a black tail-coat
and pantaloons, with several strings of beads
round the neck.

Of their costume, perhaps the less said the
better. It is very simple, and chiefly consists
of a very small dirty rag round the loins. One
king, incidentally alluded to as a drunken autocrat
with a family of more than six hundred
children, is described as a dirty, dissipated
looking negro, in a shirt, dilapidated pair of
trousers, and a flaming yellow coat. Another
king was dressed in a thick overcoat without
trousers: a costume neither so easy nor so
graceful as that of the Sandwich Island king,
whose evening dress consisted of a cocked-hat
and a pair of spurs. The Ashira women, who
are rather heavy swells, wear their shiny tresses
frizzed out into the shape of a cocked-hat, with
something like the handle of a stiletto projecting
from the centre of the forehead.

The women are bad wives, and, of course, the
men bad husbands. The men make the women
do all the work, and keep them in awe by
the unsparing use of a fearful looking whip
of river-horse skin, so that few are not marked,
with stripes. This brutal implement, indeed,
like that used in Russia and the States,
is quite capable of taking pieces out of the
skin. Some husbands, again, a little more
fiendish, punish the women by fastening thick
cords round the neck, waist, ankle, and wrist,
which they then twist with sticks till they cut
through the skin. The women often have to
bear loads of wood on their backs through forest
and jungle for six or seven miles at a stretch.
To their honour be it said, that if profligate
they are kind-hearted; whereas the men are
shockingly reckless of human life and sufferings,
and look upon their slaves with as much
contempt as the most bilious "owner" of " hands"
in the old dominion. The slave is not
considered a man; he does not speak in his own
name; his blood is tainted. One chief fastened
a whole cargo of slaves hand and foot, so that
they could not even ward off the mosquitoes, till
the buyer came to his terms. He had no ill-will
against them : he wanted his price for his goods,
and held out the threat of damaging them.

Nothing seems to come amiss to them in the
shape of food—gorilla, snake, river-horse,
leopard, elephant, crocodile, are staple articles of
food. Of the crocodile they seem to be very
fond; unluckily, it has not much meat on its
bones. Its flesh is stated to be white and tender,
but dry and tasteless. The river-horse is delicate,
but the elephant is so hard as often to
require two days' boiling; even then it is
horribly tough and stringy. However, they make
up by quantity for any defects in quality.
Indeed, the amount of meat consumed is astounding.
Fifty pounds of elephant's flesh for one
man's share for a few days, half a pig for one
hungry traveller, are talked of in a style that
makes one think an English navvy's allowance
would be looked upon as short commons. A
gorilla, or any other great ape, vanishes as
though the stomach had been converted by an
equinoctial sun into a fiery furnace. A leopard
was only a snack apiece for a small party. It
seems that both travellers and blacks, if they
run short of flesh for any time, get a
complaint called the gouamba: a terrible sickening,
gnawing pain at the stomach, which no
amount of green meat will appease. We may
assume that the men-eaters don't suffer so much
in this way; war, pestilence, and murder must
yield them an ample supply, particularly to
those who don't object to cases of natural death,
or even to their food being a little high. It is
to be hoped that some enterprising traveller
will soon tell us whether a famous custom
of this kind still exists in Ethiopia. Formerly,
in that "band of the sun," when a lady
presented her lord with twins, they used to get up
a little family party, cook the twins, and eat
them. Some of the tribes don't seem to understand
what other use can be made of slaves than
to convert them into food. One chief where
Du Chaillu visited, immediately ordered a slave
to be killed for his dinner. Meat, however,
often fails, and then they are always on the
brink of starving, as they have scarcely any
vegetable food except plantains and mancoe.
Plaintains soon rot, and they don't know how
to preserve them. Mancoe may be kept for
two months, though long before that time it
gets to be very poor eating. When these fail,
there remains but the last refuge of the starving
beast—grubbing in the woods for roots.

So then old tales are true; the Noble Savage
is the same in every clime and age. What Park
and Landor, Bruce and Burton told us, is only
amplified, and the great and benevolent Thomas
Malthus was right after all: savage life means
starvation, wretchedness, and crime, and the
poverty of Sparta was a sign, not of how high
she had risen in the scale of virtue and freedom,
but how far she had sunk towards the state of
the brute.

It all seems an awful parody on our civilised
life. One king had come to grief because he
and his people had robbed the whites till they
would no longer trade with them. Another
time a king, who had made his visit to the
traveller's hut in great haste—on the same prin-