cupy themselves in
agriculture, for the cold during the night is sometimes severe and the
poor things must suffer from it, as they have no clothes to keep them
warm.

But all my persuasions were fruitless.

I resumed my journey and it must have been about ten o'clock in the
morning when in the distance an old man who, as far as I could
understand from the half twilight of the forest, made me signs of
friendship.

I went towards him and saw that where he stood there had once been a
village but its now miserable aspect made it a strange contrast to the
riches of Nature with which it was surrounded.

The solitary inhabitant of that forsaken and dilapidated place offered
us some fruit and I asked him the reason of the battered huts and
general desolation. He told me with grief in his tones that the village
had been devastated by armed enemies. "Many of my brethren were killed
and many others were taken away as slaves and the rest have fled to
safer and more inaccessible parts, but I could not find it in my heart
to abandon this spot where I was born; where I grew up....".

This was indeed a strange sentiment for one whose people for the most
lead a roving life either from habit or from superstition!

* * * * *

Armed enemies! and who were they? For certain they appertained to the
scum of neighbouring peoples of which I have already spoken. Men who,
though encompassed on all sides by civilization, still remain
uncivilized; men who, shunned by their honest and laborious countrymen,
make the free forest a field for their vile passions, and now that they
can no longer give vent to their evil desires in depredation and
bloodshed, because of the severe measures taken by the Government,
continue to damage the poor Sakais in many odious and insidious ways
without always drawing down upon their heads the punishment they
deserve.

Who were they? Who are they? Delinquents by nature, such as are to be
found in most of our large cities; people born with savage instincts;
men who would rather pass their days in the midst of vice and open
corruption than live a life of honour and opulence.

None of these delinquents are to be found in thorough-bred Sakai tribes,
they may however be met with amongst the inhabitants of the plain where
there is a mixture of race, the result of those forced unions which were
the desperation of Sakai women when taken prisoners. In the children
born of these unions one