for the prize,--save to brood over, or gratify, the electric
passions with which his soul seems charged to bursting!

It is an interesting task to travel through a continent filled with
such people, whose minds are just beginning, here and there, to emerge
from the vilest heathenism, and to glimmer with a faith that bears
wrapped in its unfolded leaves, the seeds of a modified civilization.

* * * * *

As I travelled in the "dry season," I did not encounter many of the
discomforts that beset the African wayfarer in periods of rain and
tempest. I was not obliged to flounder through lagoons, or swim
against the current of perilous rivers. We met their traces almost
every day; and, in many places, the soil was worn into parched ravines
or the tracks of dried-up torrents. Whatever affliction I experienced
arose from the wasting depression of heat. We did not suffer from lack
of water or food, for the caravan of the ALI-MAMI commanded implicit
obedience throughout our journey.

In the six hundred miles I traversed, whilst absent from the coast, my
memory, after twenty-six years, leads me, from beginning to end,
through an almost continuous forest-path. We struck a trail when we
started, and we left it when we came home. It was rare, indeed, to
encounter a cross road, except when it led to neighboring villages,
water, or cultivated fields. So dense was the forest foliage, that we
often walked for hours in shade without a glimpse of the sun. The
emerald light that penetrated the wood, bathed every thing it touched
with mellow refreshment. But we were repaid for this partial bliss by
intense suffering when we came forth from the sanctuary into the bare
valleys, the arid _barrancas_, and marshy _savannas_ of an open
region. There, the red eye of the African sun glared with merciless
fervor. Every thing reflected its rays. They struck us like lances
from above, from below, from the sides, from the rocks, from the
fields, from the stunted herbage, from the bushes. All was glare! Our
eyes seemed to simmer in their sockets. Whenever the path followed
the channel of a brook, whose dried torrents left bare the scorched
and broken rocks, our feet fled from the ravine as from heated iron.
Frequently we entered extensive _prairies_, covered with blades of
sword-grass, tall as our heads, whose jagged edges tore us like saws,
though we protected our faces with masks of wattled willows. And yet,
after all