But in Thüringenwald,
    In Thüringenwald, '
There my good wife waits for me,
    While the nightingale sings
    To her, sweet strange things
Of the deeds done over the sea.

    Shine even-star!
    Shine fair and far
To the silvery Northern climes!
    Blow sea-breeze sweet,
    Blow home, and greet
My lady ten thousand times!

    Farewell to our Leader!
    Farewell to you, Cedar
On Lebanon! Farewell, too,
    Cyprus and Sicily!
    Beck not so busily,
We shall not weigh anchor for you,

    You siren maids
    In the scented shades
Of your rose-bearing gardens yonder!
    We have wives over there
    Of our own, as fair,
More fair, as I think, and fonder.

    For the rest of my life,
    Save my hunting-knife
No weapon will I wear now;
    And, you old sea-hare,*
    You shall henceforth bear
Your seal spear only for show.

    We will hang up our mail
    On a great gold nail,
And dispute which is bruised the sorest.
    In a doublet of green
    I will follow my Queen
Thro' the old Thüringian Forest.

    Ho! trumpet sound!
    Dash the wine to the ground!
I have pledged, and will pledge you no more, friend.
    Houp! into the selle!
    And fare ye well,
For see yonder my ship on the shore, friend.

*" Fortes prope ripas nati
    Cagnomento non irati
    Leporum lacustrium."
             J. V. SCHEFFEL.   Tristicia Amorosa.

THE NILE AND ITS NOBLE SAVAGES.

I HAVE endeavoured, says CAPTAIN SPEKE, on
the first page of his Journal of the Discovery of
the Source of the Nile, accurately to describe
naked Africa. Africa, in those places where it
has not received the slightest impulse, whether
for good or for evil, from European civilisation.
And now that Captain Speke has done so, let
our endeavour be to repeat in a few words the
substance of his story.

The whole continent of Africa he compares as
to its ups and downs to a dish turned upside
down. There is a central plateau, a surrounding
ridge, and a slope down from that mountain
ridge to the flat strip of land bordering the sea.
But of course it is not all uniform as a dish-
bottom. There are lakes in the central plateau
which, when the rains flood them, form rivers
that cut through the flanking hills and find their
way down to the sea. In the middle of the
plateau, around the head of the Tanganyika
Lake, are high hills of a clayey sandstone,
probably the old Mountains of the Moon. At the
northern end of the plateau, instead of the rim
of hills, there is a general shelving down of the
level of the country from the equator to the
Mediterranean Sea.

The rains that fill the lakes, at five degrees
south latitude, last during all the six months
that the sun is in the south: a like rule is said
to prevail at five degrees north. On the equator,
where there is also the rain-bearing influence of
the Mountains of the Moon, it rains more or
less all the year round. The winds with an
easterly tending deflect north and south, following
the sun, and are cold enough in the dry
season to make the climate pleasant; besides
that, the central region is on a plateau lifted
three thousand feet above the sea level. The
rains on the equator, under a vertical sun,
maintain a constantly profuse growth of vegetation.
This gradually decreases northward and
southward. Five degrees south, where there
are six months' drought, the natives suffer
famine if they do not lay by stores during
the fertile season to support them when the
rains are gone, but they lay by only and barely
store till the next rains, none caring or daring
to hoard larger wealth for his chief or his
neighbours to take from him. The natives are
found nowhere in dense communities, but
generally distributed over the country in tribes under
a government that is mostly patriarchal, some
tribes being pastoral, more being agricultural.
There are absolute district chiefs, with their
councils of greybeards and village chiefs, but
except among the Wahuma, otherwise called
Gallas, or Abyssinians, the travellers found no
kings. In each community the small government
revenues are only for the support of the
chief and his greybeards; thus the chief may
have a right of free drinking from the village
brews, right also to a tusk and some of the meat
of each elephant that is killed among his people,
or all the leopard, lion, and zebra skins. Every
chief takes toll—or Hongo, in the plural
Mahongo—at discretion, upon merchandise brought
into his country, and has a right to the property
of all persons within his territory who are
condemned and burnt or speared for sorcery. The
several tribes of Central Africa do not differ
essentially. They all fight a great deal with one
another; half-brothers of a polygamist father
fight together after his death over the
distribution of his slaves and cattle; while the
custom of slavery tends also in itself to
keep up a strife that keeps down population.
Moreover, men who have slaves become
doubly lazy through the dread of seeming
slavish; they avoid work, and leave to the
women the task of assisting the slaves in brewing,
cooking, grinding corn, the making of pots
and baskets, care of the household, labour in the
fields. Women are property. In the name of
dowry, the price for a wife is paid in slaves,
cows, goats, fowls, brass wire, or beads. A