and west, to allow the bright sun to stream his clear hot rays from one end to the other, and lick up quickly the moisture from the frequent showers which is not drained off by the slopes.  A little verandah is often made in front of the door, and here at dawn the family gathers round a fire, and, while enjoying the heat needed in the cold that always accompanies the first darting of the light or sun’s rays across the atmosphere, inhale the delicious air, and talk over their little domestic affairs.  The various shaped leaves of the forest all around their village and near their nestlings are bespangled with myriads of dewdrops.  The cocks crow vigorously, and strut and ogle; the kids gambol and leap on the backs of their dams quietly chewing the cud; other goats make believe fighting.  Thrifty wives often bake their new clay pots in a fire, made by lighting a heap of grass roots:  the next morning they extract salt from the ashes, and so two birds are killed with one stone.  The beauty of this morning scene of peaceful enjoyment is indescribable.  Infancy gilds the fairy picture with its own lines, and it is probably never forgotten, for the young, taken up from slavers, and treated with all philanthropic missionary care and kindness, still revert to the period of infancy as the finest and fairest they have known.  They would go back to freedom and enjoyment as fast as would our own sons of the soil, and be heedless to the charms of hard work and no play which we think so much better for them if not for us.

In some cases we found all the villages deserted; the people had fled at our approach, in dread of repetitions of the outrages of Arab slaves.  The doors were all shut:  a bunch of the leaves of reeds or of green reeds placed across them, means “no entrance here.”  A few stray chickens wander about wailing, having hid themselves while the rest were caught and carried off into the deep forest, and the still smoking fires tell the same tale of recent flight from the slave-traders.

Many have found out that I am not one of their number, so in various cases they stand up and call out loudly, “Bolongo, Bolongo!” “Friendship, Friendship!” They sell their fine iron bracelets eagerly for a few beads; for (bracelets seem out of fashion since beads came in), but they are of the finest quality of iron, and were they nearer Europe would be as eagerly sought and bought as horse-shoe nails are for the best gun-barrels.  I overhear the Manyuema telling each other that I am the “good one.”  I have no slaves, and I owe this character to the propagation of a good name by the slaves of Zanzibar, who are anything but good themselves.  I have seen slaves belonging to the seven men now with us slap the cheeks of grown men who had offered food for sale; it was done in sheer wantonness, till I threatened to thrash them if I saw it again; but out of my sight they did it still, and when I complained to the masters they confessed that all the mischief