stion, 'Would they work for Europeans?' an
affirmative answer may be given; if the Europeans belong to
the class which can pay a reasonable price for labor, and
not to that of adventurers who want employment for
themselves. All were particularly well clothed from Sandia's
to Pangola's; and it was noticed that all the cloth was of
native manufacture, the product of their own looms. In Senga
a great deal of iron is obtained from the ore, and
manufactured very cleverly."[68]

The above is a fair description of the internecine wars that have been
carried on between the tribes in Africa, back "to a time whereof the
memory of man runneth not to the contrary." In a preceding chapter we
gave quite an extended account of four Negro empires. We call
attention here to the villages of these people, and shall allow
writers who have paid much attention to this subject to give their
impressions. Speaking of a village of the Aviia tribe called Mandji,
Du Chaillu says,--

"It was the dirtiest village I had yet seen in Africa, and
the inhabitants appeared to me of a degraded class of
Negroes. The shape and arrangement of the village were quite
different from any thing I had seen before. The place was in
the form of a quadrangle, with an open space in the middle
not more than ten yards square; and the huts, arranged in a
continuous row on two sides, were not more than eight feet
high from the ground to the roof. The doors were only four
feet high, and of about the same width, with sticks placed
across on the inside, one above the other, to bar the
entrance. The place for the fire was in the middle of the
principal room, on each side of which was a little dark
chamber; and on the floor was an _orala_, or stage, to smoke
meat upon. In the middle of the yard was a hole dug in the
ground for the reception of offal, from which a disgusting
smell arose, the wretched inhabitants being too lazy or
obtuse to guard against this by covering it with earth.

"The houses were built of a framework of poles, covered with
the bark of trees, and roofed with leaves. In the middle of
the village stood the public shed, or palaver-house,--a kind
of town-hall found in almost all West-African villages. A
large fire was burning in it, on the ground; and at one end
of the shed stood a huge wooden idol, pain