do to them. Ask him, also, where he comes from,
and who captured him and his companions."

To this the negro replied--"What the white man says may be true, but the
white men seem to tell lies too much. The men who killed our warriors,
burned our villages, and took our women and children away, came to us
saying that they were friends; that they were the servants of the same
people as the white man Livingstone, and wanted to trade with us. When
we believed and trusted them, and were off our guard, they fired on us
with their guns. We know not what to think or to believe."

Harold was much perplexed by this reply, for he knew not what evidence
to cite in proof that he, at least was not a deceiver.

"Tell him," he said at length, "that there are false white men as well
as true, and that the best proof I can give him that I am one of the
true is, to set him and his friends at liberty. They are now as free to
go where they please as we are."

On receiving this assurance the negro retired to consult with his
friends. Meanwhile Antonio, who seemed to have been touched by the
unvarying kindness with which he had been treated by his employers,
opened his mind to them, and gave them a good deal of information, of
which the substance is as follows:--

At that time the merchants of the Portuguese inland town of Tette, on
the Zambesi, were carrying on the slave-trade with unusual vigour, for
this reason, that they found it difficult to obtain ivory except in
exchange for slaves. In former years they had carried on a trade in
ivory with a tribe called the Banyai, these Banyai being great
elephant-hunters, but it happened that they went to war with another
tribe named the Matabele, who had managed to steal from them all their
women and children. Consequently, the forlorn Banyai said to the Tette
merchants, when they went to trade with them as they had been accustomed
to do, "We do not want your merchandise. Bring us women and children,
and you shall have as much ivory as you wish."

These good people of Tette--being chiefly half-caste Portuguese, and
under Portuguese government, and claiming, as they do, to be the
possessors of that region of Africa--are so utterly incapable of holding
their own, that they are under the necessity of paying tribute to a
tribe of savages who come down annually to Tette to receive it, and who,
but for that tribute, would, as they easily could, expel them from the
land. These merchants of