gently blowing towards her,” she all of a sudden giving three leaps, and howling thrice, flies away in a trice.  The Bolungo or Chilumbo oath or ordeal is, of course, a “hellish ceremony.”  Demons play as active a part in Africa as in China.  The Portuguese nuncio permits the people in their simplicity to light candles before and to worship the so-called “Bull of the Blessed Sacrament,” that by which Urban viii. allowed the Congo kings to be crowned after the Catholic manner by the Capuchins, because the paper bears the “venerable effigies.”

Priests may be good servants, but they are, mundanely speaking, bad masters.  The ecclesiastical tyranny exercised upon the people from the highest to the lowest goes far to account for the extinction of Christianity in the country where so much was done to spread it.  The kings of Congoland, who “tread on the lion in the kingdom of their mothers” must abjectly address their spiritual lords.  “I conjure you, prostrate at your holy feet, to hearken to my words.”  Whilst the friars talk of “that meekness which becomes a missioner,” their unwise and unwarrantable interference extends to the Count of Sonho himself; whose election was not valid unless published in the church, owning withal that, “though a Black, he is an absolute Prince; and not unworthy of a Crown, though he were even in Italy, considering the number of his Servants and the extent of his Dominions.”  They issue eight ordinances or “spiritual memorandums” degrading governors of cities and provinces who are not properly married, who neglect mass, or who do not keep saints’ festivals.  Flogging seems to have been the punishment of all infractions of discipline, for those who used “magic guards” to their fields instead of “setting the sign of the Cross;” and for all who did not teach their children “to repeat, so many times a day, the Rosary or the Crown, in honour of the Blessed Virgin, to fast on Saturdays, to eat no flesh on Wednesdays, and such things used among Christians.”  One of the Mwanis (governors) refuses to grub up and level with his own hands a certain grove where the “hellish trade” (magic) was practised; he is commanded to discipline himself in the church during the whole time of celebrating mass.  If the governor is negligent in warning the people that a missioner has arrived, “he will receive a deserved punishment, for we make it our business to get such a person removed from his employment, even within his year,”—­a system of temporal penalties affixed to spiritual laches not unknown elsewhere.  The following anecdote will show the style of reproof.  Father Benedict da Belvedere, a Neapolitan who had preached at Rome and was likewise confessor to the nuns, heard the chief elector, one of the principal nobles, asking the heretical question, “Are we not all to be saved by baptism?” A “sound box on the ear” was the reply, and it led to a tumult.  The head of the mission sent for the offended dignitary, and offered him absolution if