iS 4 i-43-] FIRST TWO YEARS IN AFRICA. 55 



their fires and listening to their traditionary tales, he 

 intermingled the story of the Cross with their conversa- 

 tion, and it was by far the happiest portion of his journey. 

 The people were a poor, degraded, enslaved race, who 

 hunted for other tribes to procure them skins ; they 

 were far from wells, and had their gardens far from their 

 houses, in order to have their produce safe from the 

 chiefs who visited them. 



Coming on to his old friends the Bakaa, he found 

 them out of humour with him, accusing him of having 

 given poison to a native who had been seized with fever 

 on occasion of his former visit. Consequently he could 

 get little or nothing to eat, and had to content himself, 

 as he wrote to his friends, with the sumptuous feasts of 

 his imagination. With his usual habit of discovering 

 good in all his troubles, however, he found cause for 

 thankfulness at their stinginess, for in coming down a 

 steep pass, absorbed with the questions which the people 

 were putting to him, he forgot where he was, lost his 

 footing, and striking his hand between a rock and his 

 Bible which he was carrying, he suffered a compound 

 fracture of his finger. His involuntary low diet saved 

 him from taking fever, and the finger was healing favour- 

 ably, when a sudden visit in the middle of the night from 

 a lion, that threw them all into consternation, made him, 

 without thinking, discharge his revolver at the visitor, 

 and the recoil hurt him more than the shot did the lion. 

 It rebroke his finger, and the second fracture was worse 

 than the first. " The Bakwains," he says, " who were 

 most attentive to my wants during the whole journey of 

 more than 400 miles, tried to comfort me when they saw 

 the blood again flowing by saying, ' You have hurt your- 

 self, but you have redeemed us : henceforth we will only 

 swear by you.' Poor creatures," he writes to Dr. Bennett, 

 " I wished they had felt gratitude for the blood that was 

 shed for their precious souls." 



