THE TRIBES ON MY FRONTIER, 



and rapture, until they singe themselves in the flame and 

 perish. Surely, if there are tongues in trees, books in the 

 running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything, 

 then is this lamp of mine a whole tome of homilies. 



Yet there are darker pictures, where not folly only, but 

 vice has its victims ; for in the animal world many a pro- 

 mising career is wrecked by vice. I once visited a toddy 

 distillery, and, looking over the great vats of fermenting 

 palm-juice, I noticed a thick black scum on the frothy 

 liquid and asked what it was. They said it was flies, and 

 picked one out to show me. Alas ! it was a honey-bee ; 

 the little busy bee which, when it was itself, improved each 

 shining hour. There they floated in hundreds, victims to 

 intemperance. It made me melancholy. And, strange as 

 it may appear, it seems to be true that this same unex- 

 plained craving for some form of stimulant, which works 

 so much ruin to civilized man, and simply exterminates 

 aboriginal races, goes down to the lower animals, and exer- 

 cises its tyranny over them too. That the abandoned crow 

 and the gross fly ing- fox make themselves drunk on stolen 

 toddy is no great scandal, if true ; but I have seen the 

 most respectable of domestic animals (I allude to the cow), 

 growing up in a distillery, become such a slave to the 



