and elephants:  maize, holcuserghum, cassaba, sweet potatoes, and other farinaceous eatables, and with ground-nuts, palm-oil, palms, and other fat-yielding nuts, bananas, plantains, sugar-cane in great plenty.  So there is little inducement to eat men, but I wait for further evidence.

“Not knowing how your head has fared, I sometimes feel greatly distressed about you, and if I could be of any use I would leave my work unfinished to aid you.  But you will have every medical assistance that can be rendered, and I cease not to beg the Lord who healeth his people to be gracious to your infirmity.

“The object of my Expedition is the discovery of the sources of the Nile.  Had I known all the hardships, toil, and time involved, I would of been of the mind of St. Mungo, of Glasgow, of whom the song says that he let the Molendinar Burn ‘rin by,’ when he could get something stronger.  I would have let the sources ‘rin by’ to Egypt, and never been made ‘drumly’ by my plashing through them.  But I shall make this country and people better known.  ‘This,’ Professor Owen said to me, ‘is the first step; the rest will in due time follow.’  By different agencies the Great Ruler is bringing all things into a focus.  Jesus is gathering all things unto Himself, and He is daily becoming more and more the centre of the world’s hopes and of the world’s fears.  War brought freedom to 4,000,000 of the most hopeless and helpless slaves.  The world never saw such fiendishness as that with which the Southern slaveocracy clung to slavery.  No power in this world or the next would ever make them relax their iron grasp.  The lie had entered into their soul.  Their cotton was King.  With it they would force England and France to make them independent, because without it the English and French must starve.  Instead of being made a nation, they made a nation of the North.  War has elevated and purified the Yankees, and now they have the gigantic task laid at their doors to elevate and purify 4,000,000 of slaves.  I earnestly hope that the Northerners may not be found wanting in their portion of the superhuman work.  The day for Africa is yet to come.  Possibly the freed men may be an agency in elevating their fatherland.

“England is in the rear.  This affair in Jamaica brought out the fact of a large infusion of bogiephobia in the English.  Frightened in early years by their mothers with ’Bogie Blackman,’ they were terrified out of their wits by a riot, and the sensation writers, who act the part of the ’dreadful boys’ who frightened aunts, yelled out that emancipation was a mistake.  ’The Jamaica negroes were as savage as when they left Africa.’  They might have put it much stronger by saying, as the rabble that attended Tom Sayers’s funeral, or that collects at every execution at Newgate.  But our golden age is not in the past.  It is in the future—­in the good time coming yet for Africa and for the world.