r due, he says, "but after a course of such charms, one falls back
with pleasure upon brown, yellow or what is better than all, red-auburn
locks and eyes of soft, limpid blue." How the blue eyes of Mrs. Burton
must have glistened when she read those words; and we can imagine
her taking one more look in the glass to see if her hair really was
red-auburn, as, of course, it was.

Burton dedicated this work to the "True Friends" of the Dark Continent,
"not to the 'Philanthropist' or to Exeter Hall." [187] One of its
objects was to give a trustworthy account of the negro character and to
point out the many mistakes that well-intentioned Englishmen had made in
dealing with it. To put it briefly, he says that the negro [188] is an
inferior race, and that neither education nor anything else can raise it
to the level of the white. After witnessing, at the Grand Bonny River, a
horrid exhibition called a Juju or sacrifice house, he wrote, "There is
apparently in this people [the negroes] a physical delight in cruelty to
beast as well as to man. The sight of suffering seems to bring them
an enjoyment without which the world is tame; probably the wholesale
murderers and torturers of history, from Phalaris and Nero downwards,
took an animal and sensual pleasure in the look of blood, and in the
inspection of mortal agonies. I can see no other explanation of the
phenomena which meet my eye in Africa. In almost all the towns on the
Oil Rivers, you see dead or dying animals in some agonizing position."
[189]

Cowper had written:

"Skins may differ, but affection
Dwells in white and black the same;"

"which I deny," comments Burton, "affection, like love, is the fruit of
animalism refined by sentiment." He further declares that the Black
is in point of affection inferior to the brutes. "No humane Englishman
would sell his dog to a negro." [190] The phrase "God's image in ebony"
lashed him to a fury.

Of his landing at Sierra Leone he gives the following anecdote: [191]
"The next day was Sunday, and in the morning I had a valise carried
up to the house to which I had been invited. When I offered the man
sixpence, the ordinary fee, he demanded an extra sixpence, 'for breaking
the Sabbath.' I gave it readily, and was pleased to find that the
labours of our missionaries had not been in vain." At Cape Coast
Castle, he recalled the sad fate of "L.E.L." [192] and watched the women
"panning the sand of the shore for gold." He found t