fairly successful in our work.  Then on one evil day the Swahili and other Arabs came in dhows to establish a slave-dealing station.  I resisted them, and the end of it was that they attacked us, killed most of my people and enslaved the rest.  In that attack I received a cut from a sword on the head—­look, here is the mark of it,” and drawing his white hair apart he showed us a long scar that was plainly visible in the moonlight.

“The blow knocked me senseless just about sunset one evening.  When I came to myself again it was broad daylight and everybody was gone, except one old woman who was tending me.  She was half-crazed with grief because her husband and two sons had been killed, and another son, a boy, and a daughter had been taken away.  I asked her where my young wife was.  She answered that she, too, had been taken away eight or ten hours before, because the Arabs had seen the lights of a ship out at sea, and thought they might be those of a British man-of-war that was known to be cruising on the coast.  On seeing these they had fled inland in a hurry, leaving me for dead, but killing the wounded before they went.  The old woman herself had escaped by hiding among some rocks on the seashore, and after the Arabs had gone had crept back to the house and found me still alive.

“I asked her where my wife had been taken.  She said she did not know, but some others of our people told her that they had heard the Arabs say they were going to some place a hundred miles inland, to join their leader, a half-bred villain named Hassan-ben-Mohammed, to whom they were carrying my wife as a present.

“Now we knew this wretch, for after the Arabs landed at Kilwa, but before actual hostilities broke out between us, he had fallen sick of smallpox and my wife had helped to nurse him.  Had it not been for her, indeed, he would have died.  However, although the leader of the band, he was not present at the attack, being engaged in some slave-raiding business in the interior.

“When I learned this terrible news, the shock of it, or the loss of blood, brought on a return of insensibility, from which I only awoke two days later to find myself on board a Dutch trading vessel that was sailing for Zanzibar.  It was the lights of this ship that the Arabs had seen and mistaken for those of an English man-of-war.  She had put into Kilwa for water, and the sailors, finding me on the verandah of the house and still living, in the goodness of their hearts carried me on board.  Of the old woman they had seen nothing; I suppose that at their approach she ran away.

“At Zanzibar, in an almost dying condition, I was handed over to a clergyman of our mission, in whose house I lay desperately ill for a long while.  Indeed six months went by before I fully recovered my right mind.  Some people say that I have never recovered it; perhaps you are one of them, Allan.