to its fullest extent the immeasurable vastness of
the sin and crime of which the Wazavila freebooters were guilty. They
had wantonly attacked an unoffending village, and reduced to servitude
and misery the poor people, whose homes had been fired, the flames of
which had made the sombre night lurid with the red glare, and had
exhausted themselves among smoking embers and the scorched bodies of the
men who had lost their lives in disputing the advance of the Wazavila
assassins and midnight robbers, who had stealthily entered this village
to make the night hideous and awful with their crimes.

Step by step, through that pathless jungle and forest, which seemed
interminable, did the poor people moisten the ground with their bloody
sweat; step by step did they vent their miseries in hot tears, in
groans, which were answered by vicious blows on their backs from their
relentless captors. Each day saw an infant, which had been until then
full of promise of lusty life, laid down by the side of the path cold
and dead; for the mother, under the load of her miseries and privation,
could not sustain the young life with her emptied breasts, and too often
for detailed recital, she herself resignedly knelt and died by her
starved offspring. Too often, alas! did the wretched mother, lacking
proper sustenance, first fall dead in her tracks, with her little baby
vainly sucking at the chilled breast, while a blank look of hopelessness
stole over his little face as he wonderingly looked after the departing
caravan, and trembled with an unexplained horror at the dread silence
and loneliness of the forest. No mourner was left behind to bewail the
fate of these hapless ones; only the moaning winds sang their monotonous
requiems until the voracious hyaena and the hungry jackal came to
consume that which had become as a blight and ugly spot on nature.

Nothing was better calculated to cure Selim and Abdullah of the desire
of ever making money by buying and selling slaves than these scenes,
even if the unutterable wretchedness of their own condition had not
taught them the full meaning of the term "slave" before this.

Day by day every good feeling within them was shocked; for day by day
new victims to human lust of gain were left cold and stretched in death
along the road--old and young seemed to perish alike from the same
cause--starvation and fatigue. Neither the patriarch nor the child was
absolved from the dire fate.

About the fift