ocodile and huge river-horse, land teeming with animal
life, and, last in the list of my apostrophic appellations--last, and
that which must grieve the heart to pronounce it, land of the slave!

Ah; little do men think, while thus hailing thee, how near may be the
dread doom to their own hearths and homes! Little dream they, while
expressing their sympathy--alas! too often, as of late shown in England,
a hypocritical utterance--little do they suspect, while glibly
commiserating the lot of thy sable-skinned children, that hundreds, ay
thousands, of their own colour and kindred are held within thy confines,
subject to a lot even lowlier than these--a fate far more fearful.

Alas! it is even so. While I write, the proud Caucasian, despite his
boasted superiority of intellect, despite the whiteness of his skin, may
be found by hundreds in the unknown interior, wretchedly toiling, the
slave not only of thy oppressors, but the slave of thy slaves!

Let us lift that curtain which shrouds thy great Saara, and look upon
some pictures that should teach the son of Shem, while despising his
brothers Ham and Japhet, that he is not master of the world.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dread is that shore between Susa and Senegal, on the western edge of
Africa--by mariners most dreaded of any other in the world. The very
thought of it causes the sailor to shiver with affright. And no wonder;
on that inhospitable seaboard thousands of his fellows have found a
watery grave; and thousands of others a doom far more deplorable than
death!

There are two great deserts: one of land, the other of water--the Saara
and the Atlantic--their contiguity extending through ten degrees of the
earth's latitude--an enormous distance. Nothing separates them, save a
line existing only in the imagination. The dreary and dangerous
wilderness of water kisses the wilderness of sand--not less dreary or
dangerous to those whose misfortune it may be to become castaways on
this dreaded shore.

Alas! it has been the misfortune of many--not hundreds, but thousands.
Hundreds of ships, rather than hundreds of men, have suffered wreck and
ruin between Susa and Senegal. Perhaps were we to include Roman,
Phoenician, and Carthaginian, we might say thousands of ships also.

More noted, however, have been the disasters of modern times, during
what may be termed the epoch of modern navigation. Within the period of
th