Koualcgn (Bcoroc <3orfcon Cummino **v 



with my mouth and obtained the sweetest beverage 

 I ever tasted." And this was the man who prided 

 himself on his humanity, his fine feeling, his tender 

 sentiment ! A fig for such sentiment ! 



But with all his sentiment Gordon Gumming had in 

 him a strain of the canny Scot, whose keen eye for the 

 main chance is proverbial. He did a good bit of trading 

 with the natives, and his methods were characterised by 

 more sharpness than honesty. He bartered muskets for 

 ivory ; and he tells us, with evident pride in his own astute- 

 ness, that he paid 16 for each case of twenty muskets, 

 and that for each musket he demanded 30 worth of 

 ivory, making thereby a gain of 3,000 per cent. ! That 

 was bad enough, but to add lying to cheating was going 

 a little too far. Yet he not only allowed the bamboozled 

 natives to believe that their fifteen-shilling muskets were 

 precisely the same kind of weapons as his own double- 

 barrelled Purdey and Dickson, but he calmly assured 

 them that each musket had cost " many teeth " in his 

 own country, leaving them to infer that he was a 

 philanthropist selling goods at a loss for the benefit of 

 his fellow-men ! From a trader's point of view this was 

 smart, no doubt, and excusable, but it is hardly what 

 one would expect from a sportsman and a Highland 

 gentleman. 



There were other ways, too, in which this High- 

 land gentleman, the representative of Christianity and 

 civilisation, " played it low down " on the ignorant, 

 if not wholly guileless, aboriginal. Take the following 

 as a specimen : 



" The Griquas, taking advantage of the superstitions 



19 



