The dietary of these “wild men of the woods” would astonish the starveling sons of civilization.  When will the poor man realize the fact that his comfort and happiness will result not from workhouses and almshouses, hospitals and private charities, but from that organized and efficient emigration, so long advocated by the seer Carlyle?  Only the crassest ignorance and the listlessness born of misery and want prevent the able-bodied pauper, the frozen-out mechanic, or the weary and ill-clad, the over-worked and under-fed agricultural labourer, from quitting the scenes of his purgatory, and from finding, scattered over earth’s surface, spots where he may enjoy a comparative paradise, heightened by the memory of privations endured in the wretched hole which he pleases to call his home.  But nostalgia is a more common disease than men suppose, and it affects none more severely than those that are remarkable for their physical powers.  A national system of emigration, to be perfect, must not be confined to solitary and individual hands, who, however numerous, are ever pining for the past.  The future will organize the exodus of whole villages, which, like those of the Hebrides in the last century, will bear with them to new worlds their Lares and Penates, their wives, families, and friends, who will lay out the church and the churchyard after the old fashion familiar to their youth, and who will not forget the palaver-house, vulgarly called pothouse or pub.

Few of these Lestrigons lack fish, which they catch in weirs, fowl, flesh of dogs, goats, or sheep; cattle is a luxury yet unknown, but the woods supply an abundance of Nyare and other “bush-beef.”  They also have their special word for the meat-yearning.  Still in the semi-nomadic stage, they till the ground, and yet depend greatly upon the chase.  They break their fast (kidiashe) at 6 A.M., eat a mid-day meal (amos), and sup (gogashe) at sunset, besides “snacks” all through the day when they can find material.  They are good huntsmen, who fear neither the elephant (nyok), the hippopotamus (nyok a madzim), frequent in the rivers of the interior, the crocodile, nor the gorilla (nji).  It is generally asserted—­and the unfortunate Douville re-echoed the assertion—­that the river-horse and the crocodile will not live together; the reason is, simply, that upon the seaboard, where these animals were first observed, the crocodile prefers the fresh water of the river, the hippopotamus the brackish water at its mouth.  In the interior, of course, they dwell together in amity, because there is nothing for them to quarrel about.