him of Zinder, as their ruler and lord, and prayed him
to give them water and peace." The Sarkee replied, "When my brother fled
to you, you also would not allow him to drink, nor will I now permit
you; therefore surrender into our hands." The people of the town held
out these four days, and then during a night they all fled to the rocks
and escaped.

There are but few places to make razzias upon around Zinder, except on
the Sheikh's provinces, unless the Sarkee will go to Maradee, and there
he is now in friendship, or else is afraid to move in that direction. In
the account of the booty, it is to be understood that all of it was not
brought to Zinder, some having been distributed amongst the troops and
volunteers of the rest of the province. I am told that the greater part
of the slaves will be sent to Kanou for sale. It has already been
observed, that only a few slaves go to the north in comparison with the
numbers captured. The bulk of the slaves of the razzias are employed as
serfs on the soil, or servants in the town. In Kanou, a rich man has
three or four thousand slaves; these are permitted to work on their own
account, and they pay him as their lord and master a certain number of
cowries every month: some bring one hundred, some three hundred or six
hundred, or as low as fifty cowries a-month. On the accumulation of
these various monthly payments of the poor slaves the great man
subsists, and is rich and powerful in the country. This system prevails
in all the Fellatah districts.

At dusk, there was a hue and cry near our house. I ran out to see what
it was: the noise and stir was nothing less than an attempt of a slave
to escape. The poor fellow was surrounded by a mass of men and boys, all
anxious to seize him and deliver him to his master, to obtain the
reward.

My sympathies certainly begin to cool when I see the conduct of these
blacks to one another. The blacks are, in truth, the real active
men-stealers, though incited thereto frequently by the slave-merchants
of the north and south. It must be confessed, that if there were no
white men from the north or south to purchase the supply of slaves
required out of Africa, slavery would still flourish, though it might be
often in a mitigated form; and this brings me to the reiteration of my
opinion, that only foreign conquest by a power like Great Britain or
France can really extirpate slavery from Africa.

_3d._--The sky never gets clear here till late at ni