Men, women, and children when hardly “cremnobatic,” have always the pipe in mouth.  The favourite article is a “dudheen,” a well culotte clay, used and worn till the bowl touches the nose.  The poor are driven to a “Kondukwe,” a yard of plantain leaf, hollowed with a wire, and charged at the thicker end.  The “holy herb” would of course grow in the country, and grow well, but it is imported from the States without trouble, and perhaps with less expense.  Some tribes make a decent snuff of the common trade article, but I never saw either sex chew—­perhaps the most wholesome, and certainly the most efficacious form.  The smoking of Lyamba, called Dyamba in the southern regions, is confined to debauchees.  M. du Chaillu asserts that this Cannabis sativa is not found wild, and the people confirm his statement; possibly it has extended from Hindostan to Zanzibar, and thence across the continent.  Intoxicating hemp is now grown everywhere, especially in the Nkommi country, and little packages, neatly bound with banana leaves, sell on the river for ten sous each.  It is smoked either in the “Kondukwe” or in the Ojo.  The latter, literally meaning a torch, is a polished cow-horn, closed at the thick end with wood, and banded with metal; a wooden stem, projecting from the upper or concave side, bears a neat “chillam” (bowl), either of clay or of brown steatite brought from the upper Gaboon River.  This rude hookah is half filled with water; the dried hemp in the bowl is covered with what Syrians call a “Kurs,” a bit of metal about the size of half-a-crown, and upon it rests the fire.  I at once recognized the implement in the Brazil, where many slave-holders simply supposed it to be a servile and African form of tobacco-pipe.  After a few puffs the eyes redden, a violent cough is caused by the acrid fumes tickling the throat; the brain, whirls with a pleasant swimming, like that of chloroform, and the smoker finds himself in gloria.  My Spanish friends at Po tried but did not like it.  I can answer for the hemp being stronger than the Egyptian hashish or the bhang of Hindostan; it rather resembled the Fasukh of Northern Africa, the Dakha and Motukwane of the southern regions, and the wild variety called in Sind “Bang i Jabali.”

The religion of African races is ever interesting to those of a maturer faith; it is somewhat like the study of childhood to an old man.  The Jew, the high-caste Hindu, and the Guebre, the Christian and the Moslem have their Holy Writs, their fixed forms of thought and worship, in fact their grooves in which belief runs.  They no longer see through a glass darkly; nothing with them is left vague or undetermined.  Continuation, resurrection, eternity are hereditary and habitual ideas; they have become almost inseparable and congenital parts of the mental system.  This condition renders it nearly as difficult for us to understand the vagueness and mistiness of savage and unwritten creeds, as to penetrate into the modus agendi