SALT A CURE FOR INDIGESTION. 33 



had frequent opportunities of seeing at other times, for, the dis- 

 trict being destitute of salt, the rich alone could afford to buy it. 

 The native doctors, aware of the cause of the malady, usually 

 prescribed some of that ingredient with their medicines. The 

 doctors themselves had none, so the poor resorted to us for aid. 

 We took the hint, and henceforth cured the disease by giving a 

 teaspoonful of salt, minus the other remedies. Either milk or 

 meat had the same effect, though not so rapidly as salt. Long 

 afterward, when I was myself deprived of salt for four months, 

 at two distinct periods, I felt no desire for that condiment, but I 

 was plagued by very great longing for the above articles of food. 

 This continued as long as I was confined to an exclusively vege- 

 table diet, and when I procured a meal of flesh, though boiled 

 in perfectly fresh rain-water, it tasted as pleasantly saltish as if 

 slightly impregnated with the condiment. Milk or meat, obtained 

 in however small quantities, removed entirely the excessive long- 

 ing and dreaming about roasted ribs of fat oxen, and bowls of cool 

 thick milk gurgling forth from the big-bellied calabashes ; and I 

 could then understand the thankfulness to Mrs. L. often expressed 

 by poor Bakwain women, in the interesting condition, for a very 

 little of either. 



In addition to other adverse influences, the general uncertainty, 

 though not absolute want of food, and the necessity of frequent 

 absence for the purpose of either hunting game or collecting roots 

 and fruits, proved a serious barrier to the progress of the people 

 in knowledge. Our own education in England is carried on at 

 the comfortable breakfast and dinner table, and by the cosy fire, 

 as well as in the church and school. Few English people with 

 stomachs painfully empty would be decorous at church any more 

 than they are when these organs are overcharged. Ragged schools 

 would have been a failure had not the teachers wisely provided 

 food for the body as well as food for the mind ; and not only must 

 we show a friendly interest in the bodily comfort of the objects 

 of our sympathy as a Christian duty, but we can no more hope 

 for healthy feelings among the poor, either at home or abroad, 

 without feeding them into them, than we can hope to see an 

 ordinary working-bee reared into a queen-mother by the ordinary 

 food of the hive. 



Sending the Gospel to the heathen must, if this view be correct* 



C 



