demanded a surrender,
Fana-Toro strode into the "palaver-house," commanding a _sortie_ with
his famished madmen. The warriors protested against the idea, for
their ammunition was exhausted. Then arose a wild shout for the king's
deposition and the election of a chief to succeed him. A candidate was
instantly found and installed; but no sooner had he been chosen, than
Fana-Toro,--daring the new prince to prove a power of _endurance_
equal to his own,--plunged his finger in a bowl of boiling oil, and
held it over the fire, without moving a muscle, till the flesh was
crisped to the bone.

It is hardly necessary to say that the sovereign was at once restored
to his rights, or that, availing himself of the fresh enthusiasm, he
rushed upon his besiegers, broke their lines, routed the mercenaries,
and compelled his rival to sue for peace. Until the day of his death,
that mutilated hand was the boast of his people.

The Vey people mark with some ceremony the extremes of human
existence--birth and death. Both events are honored with feasting,
drinking, dancing, and firing; and the descendants of the dead
sometimes impoverish, and even ruin themselves, to inter a venerable
parent with pomp.

Prince Gray, the son of Fana-Toro, whom I have already mentioned, died
during my occupation of Cape Mount. I was at Mesurado when the event
happened, but, as soon as I heard it, I resolved to unite with his
relations in the last rites to his memory. Gray was not only a good
negro and kind neighbor, but, as my fast friend in "country matters,"
his death was a personal calamity.

The breath was hardly out of the prince's body, when his sons, who
owned but little property and had no slaves for sale, hastened to my
agent, and pledged their town of Panama for means to defray his
funeral. In the mean time, the corpse, swathed in twenty large country
sheets, and wrapped in twenty pieces of variegated calico, was laid
out in a hut, where it was constantly watched and _smoked_ by three of
the favorite widows.

After two months devotion to moaning and _seasoning_, notice was sent
forty miles round the country, summoning the tribes to the final
ceremony. On the appointed day the corpse was brought from the hut, _a
perfect mass of bacon_. As the procession moved towards the
palaver-house, the prince's twenty wives--almost entirely denuded,
their heads shaved, and their bodies smeared with dust--were seen
following his remains. The eldest spouse a