As to her companions, Mrs. Weldon had heard nothing of them.  After having seen Hercules flee into the forest, she did not know what had become of him.  As to Dick Sand, as Harris and Negoro were no longer there to torture him, she hoped that his being a white man would perhaps spare him some bad treatment.  As to Nan, Tom, Bat, Austin, and Acteon, they were blacks, and it was too certain that they would be treated as such.  Poor people! who should never have trodden that land of Africa, and whom treachery had just cast there.

When Ibn Hamis’s caravan had arrived at Kazounde, Mrs. Weldon, having no communication with the outer world, could not know of the fact:  neither did the noises from the lakoni tell her anything.  She did not know that Tom and his friends had been sold to a trader from Oujiji, and that they would soon set out.  She neither knew of Harris’s punishment, nor of King Moini Loungga’s death, nor of the royal funeral ceremonies, that had added Dick Sand to so many other victims.  So the unfortunate woman found herself alone at Kazounde, at the trader’s mercy, in Negoro’s power, and she could not even think of dying in order to escape him, because her child was with her.

Mrs. Weldon was absolutely ignorant of the fate that awaited her.  Harris and Negoro had not addressed a word to her during the whole journey from the Coanza to Kazounde.  Since her arrival, she had not seen either of them again, and she could not leave the enclosure around the rich trader’s private establishment.  Is it necessary to say now that Mrs. Weldon had found no help in her large child, Cousin Benedict?  That is understood.

When the worthy savant learned that he was not on the American continent, as he believed, he was not at all anxious to know how that could have happened.  No!  His first movement was a gesture of anger.  The insects that he imagined he had been the first to discover in America, those tsetses and others, were only mere African hexapodes, found by many naturalists before him, in their native places.  Farewell, then, to the glory of attaching his name to those discoveries!  In fact, as he was in Africa, what could there be astonishing in the circumstance that Cousin Benedict had collected African insects.

But the first anger over, Cousin Benedict said to himself that the “Land of the Pharaohs”—­so he still called it—­possessed incomparable entomological riches, and that so far as not being in the “Land of the Incas” was concerned, he would not lose by the change.

“Ah!” he repeated, to himself, and even repeated to Mrs. Weldon, who hardly listened to him, “this is the country of the manticores, those coleopteres with long hairy feet, with welded and sharp wing-shells, with enormous mandibles, of which the most remarkable is the tuberculous manticore.  It is the country of the calosomes with golden ends; of the Goliaths of Guinea and of the Gabon, whose