artered and disjointed with astonishing celerity. And women bearing
the oblong baskets return within the stockade, passing through the
hideous gateway, staggering beneath the weight of limbs and trunks of
their slaughtered fellow-species. Within the open space great fires now
leap and crackle into life, roaring upward upon the still air, reddening
as with a demon-glow this hellish scene, and, gathering around, the
savages impatiently and with hungry eyes watch the cooking of the
disjointed members, and, hardly able to restrain their impatience,
snatch their horrible roast from the flames and embers before it is
much more than warmed through; and with laugh and shout the cannibal
orgy goes on, prolonged far into the night, the bones and refuse being
flung to the women in the background.

At last, surfeited with their frightful feast, these demons in human
shape drop down and sleep like brute beasts. And the full moon soaring
high in the heavens looks down with a gibing sneer in her cold cruel
face upon this scene of a shocking human shambles; and her light, so far
from irradiating this "dark place of the earth," seems but to shed a
livid sulphurous glare upon a very antechamber of hell.

The moon floats higher and higher above the tropical forest, flooding
the seas of slumbering foliage with silver light. Hour follows upon
hour, and in the stockaded village all is silent as with the stillness
of death. The ghastly remnants of that fearful feast lie around in the
moonbeams--human bones, picked clean, yet expressive in their shape,
spectral, as though they would fain reunite, and, vampire-like, return
to drain the life-blood of these human wolves who devour their own kind.
But the sleep of the latter is calm, peaceful, secure.

Secure? Wait! What are these stealthy forms rising noiselessly among the
undergrowth on the outskirts of the clearing? Are they ghosts? Ghosts of
those thus barbarously slain and of many others before them? The moonlit
sward is alive with flitting shapes, gliding towards the stockade,
surrounding it on all sides with a celerity and fixity of purpose which
can have but one meaning. And among them is the glint of metal, the
shining of rifle barrels and spear blades.

The inhabitants of that village are savages, and thus, for all their
flesh-gorged state of heavy slumber, are instinctively on the alert.
They wake, and rush forth with wild yells of alarm, of warning. But to
many of them it is the l