322 MAGIC LANTERN. 



I was dissatisfied with her size, and sent for one a head taller ; 

 after many explanations of our abhorrence of slavery, and how 

 displeasing it must he to God to see his children selling one 

 another, and giving each other so much grief as this child's 

 mother must feel, I declined her also. If I could have taken 

 her into my family for the purpose of instruction, and then re- 

 turned her as a free woman, according to a promise I should 

 have made to the parents, I might have done so ; hut to take 

 her away, and prohahly never he able to secure her return, would 

 have produced no good effect on the minds of the Balonda ; they 

 would not then have seen evidence of our hatred to slavery, and 

 the kind attentions of my friends would, as it almost always does 

 in similar cases, have turned the poor thing's head. The dif- 

 ference in position between them and us is as great as between 

 the lowest and highest in England, and we know the effects of 

 sudden elevation on wiser heads than hers, whose owners had not 

 been born to it. 



Shinte was most anxious to see the pictures of the magic 

 lantern ; but fever had so weakening an effect, and I had such 

 violent action of the heart, with buzzing in the ears, that I could 

 not go for several days ; when I did go for the purpose, he had 

 his principal men and the same crowd of court beauties near 

 him as at the reception. The first picture exhibited was Abra- 

 ham about to slaughter his son Isaac ; it was shown as large as 

 life, and the uplifted knife was in the act of striking the lad; 

 the Balonda men remarked that the picture was much more like 

 a god than the things of wood or clay they worshiped. I ex- 

 plained that this man was the first of a race to whom God had 

 given the Bible we now held, and that among his children our 

 Savior appeared. The ladies listened with silent awe; but, 

 when I moved the slide, the uplifted dagger moving toward 

 them, they thought it was to be sheathed in their bodies instead 

 of Isaac's. "Mother! mother!" all shouted at once, and off 

 they rushed helter-skelter, tumbling pell-mell over each other, 

 and over the little idol-huts and tobacco-bushes : we could not 

 get one of them back again. Shinte, however, sat bravely 

 through the whole, and afterward examined the instrument 

 with interest. An explanation was always added after each 

 time of showing its powers, so that no one should imagine there 



