exceedingly difficult. You are
aware that Arab traders swarm upon the coast, that they are reckless
men, who possess boats and money in abundance, that the trade is very
profitable, and that, being to some extent real traders in ivory,
palm-oil, indigo, and other kinds of native produce, these men have many
_ruses_ and methods--what you English call dodges--whereby they can
deceive even the most sharp-sighted and energetic. The Arabs are smart
smugglers of negroes--very much as your people who live in the Scottish
land are smart smugglers of the dew of the mountain--what your great
poet Burns speaks much of--I forget its name--it is not easy to put them
down."

After dinner, Senhor Letotti led the officers into his garden, and
showed them his fruit-trees and offices, also his domestic slaves, who
looked healthy, well cared for, and really in some degree happy.

He did not, however, tell his guests that being naturally a humane man,
his slaves were better treated than any other slaves in the town. He
did not remind them that, being slaves, they were his property, his
goods and chattels, and that he possessed the right and the power to
flay them alive if so disposed. He did not explain that many in the
town _were_ so disposed; that cruelty grows and feeds upon itself; that
there were ladies and gentlemen there who flogged their slaves--men,
women, and children--nearly to the death; that one gentleman of an
irascible disposition, when irritated by some slight oversight on the
part of the unfortunate boy who acted as his valet, could find no relief
to his feelings until he had welted him first into a condition of
unutterable terror, and then into a state of insensibility. Neither did
he inform them that a certain lady in the town, who seemed at most times
to be possessed of a reasonably quiet spirit, was roused once to such a
degree by a female slave that she caused her to be forcibly held, thrust
a boiling hot egg into her mouth, skewered her lips together with a
sail-needle, and then striking her cheeks, burst the egg, and let the
scalding contents run down her throat. [See Consul McLeod's _Travels_,
volume two page 32.]

No, nothing of all this did the amiable Governor Letotti so much as hint
at. He would not for the world have shocked the sensibilities of his
guests by the recital of such cruelties. To say truth, the worthy man
himself did not like to speak or think of them. In this respect he
resembled a ce