has been sold or bartered they bound on to their
ponies and career madly homewards, each one trying to outdo his neighbour
in deeds of recklessness in the hope of winning favour in the eyes of the
dusky maidens. They are mean in regard to money or gifts, and know the
intrinsic value of things just as well as any pedlar in all England.
Judging the "nigger" merely as a human being, irrespective of sentiment,
colour, and so forth, I can only say that in my estimation he and his are
far better off in every respect than the average white labourer and his
family in England. These folk have plenty to eat, little to do, and are
very jolly. They would be perfectly happy if they only had a sufficient
number of rifles and a large enough supply of ammunition to enable them to
drive every white man clean away from their borders.

When I arrived at Jonathan's village that warrior was away with a band of
his young men, so that I could not see him, though I saw his son at a
wedding which was being held when I reached the scene. I was taken through
rows of naked, grinning savages, of both sexes, to be introduced to the
bride and bridegroom, whom I found to be a pair of mission converts. When I
saw the pair the shock nearly shook my boots off. The bride, a full-blooded
young negress, was dressed in a beautiful white satin dress, which fitted
her as if it had been fired at her out of a gun. It would not meet in front
by about three inches, and the bodice was laced up by narrow bands of red
silk, like a foot-baller's jersey. In her short, woolly hair she had pinned
a wreath of artificial orange blossoms, which looked like a diadem of snow
on a mid-winter mudheap. Down her broad back there hung a great gauzy lace
veil, big enough to make a fly-net for a cow camel in summer. It was not
fixed on to her dress, nor to her wreath, but was tied on to two little
kinky curls at each side of her head by bright green ribbons, after the
fashion of a prize filly of the draught order at a country fair. Her hands
were encased in a pair of white kid gloves, man's size, and a pretty big
man at that, for she had a gentle little fist that would have scared John
L. Sullivan in his palmiest days.

When I was introduced to the newly shackled matron she put one of those
gloved hands into mine with a simpering air of coyness that made me feel
cold all over, for that hand in the kid glove reminded me of the day I took
my first lesson from Laurence Foley, Australia'