There was a beautiful girl whose parents were rich.  Men came to marry her, but she always said “Not yet.”  Men continued to come, but she said “My shape is good, my skin is good, therefore I shall stay;” and she stayed.

Now the leopard, in the leopard’s place, hears this.  He turns himself to resemble man.  He takes a musical instrument in his hand and makes himself a fine young man.  His shape is good.  Then he goes to the parents of the maiden and says, “I look strong and manly, but I do not look stronger than I love.”  Then the father says, “Who looks strong takes;” and the young man says, “I am ready.”

The young man comes in the house.  His shape pleases the young girl.  They give him to eat and they give him to drink.  Then the young man asks the maiden if she is ready to go, and the maiden says she is ready to go.  Her parents give her two female slaves to take along, and goats, sheep, and fowls.  Ere long, as they travel along the road, the husband says, “I am hungry.”  He eats the fowls, but is still hungry:  he eats the goats and sheep and is hungry still.  The two slaves next fall a victim to his voracity, and then he says, “I am hungry.”

Then the wife weeps and cries aloud and throws herself on the ground.  Immediately the leopard, having resumed his own shape, makes a leap toward her.  But there is a hunter concealed in the bush; he has witnessed the scene; he aims his gun and kills the leopard on the leap.  Then he cuts off his tail and takes the young woman home.

“This is the way of young women,” the tale concludes.  “The young men come to ask; the young women meet them, and continue to refuse—­again, again, again—­and so the wild animals turn themselves into men and carry them off.”

AFRICAN STORY-BOOKS

While the main object of this discussion is to show that Africans are incapable of feeling sentimental love, I have taken the greatest pains to discover such traces of more refined feelings as may exist.  These one might expect to find particularly in the collections of African tales such as Callaway’s Nursery Tales of the Zulus, Theal’s Kaffir Folk Lore, the Folk Lore of Angola, Stanley’s My Dark Companions and their Stories, Koelle’s African Native Literature, Jacottet’s Contes Populaires des Bassoutos.  All that I have been able to find in these books and others bearing on our topic is included in this chapter—­and how very little it is!  Love, even of the sensual kind, seems to be almost entirely ignored by these dusky story-tellers in favor of a hundred other subjects—­in striking contrast to our own literature, in which love is the ruling passion.  I have before me another interesting collection of South and North African stories and fables—­Bleek’s Reinecke Fuchs in Afrika.  Its author had unusual facilities