Chap. XXI. ENGLISHMEN IN AFRICA. 433 



the silly assumption that the negro is this, that, and the 

 other thing, and not, like other men, a curious mixture 

 of good and evil, wisdom and folly, cleverness and stupidity. 

 An Englishman possessed of a gun, which had the ugly trick 

 of going off of itself, came up the Zambesi in a canoe 

 manned by natives. He scarcely knew another word of 

 the language than the verb " to kill" The gun, as was 

 its wont, accidentally went off close to the head of one of 

 the party, who, before going to sleep, expressed his fears 

 to his comrades that this unlucky gun might "kill" some 

 of them. Our hero caught the word, and spent the whole 

 night revolver in hand, ready to punish the treachery which 

 existed only in his own excited brain. This adventure he 

 afterwards published in a newspaper as a terrible situation, 

 a hairbreadth escape from bloodthirsty savages. Another 

 British Lion, having to travel some two hundred miles in a 

 canoe, and being unable to speak a word of the language, 

 thought it clever to fire off all the barrels of his revolver 

 every time his canoe-men proposed to land during the live- 

 long day. The torrid sun right overhead was at its hottest. 

 The poor fellows made signs they wished to purchase some 

 beer. Off went the revolver, " No, no, no, paddle you must." 

 This madness, as described to us by himself, was evidently 

 thought clever. Another, whose estimate of himself and 

 that formed of him by a tribe he visited did not at all 

 coincide, after complaining at a public meeting of the un- 

 truthfulness of a previous traveller to whom that same tribe 

 had shown distinguished kindness and respect, stated, as we 

 learn on the authority of a clergyman who was present, that 

 he had tied up one of his people before reaching the tribe 

 referred to, "and given him a sound thrashing." Let us 

 fancy the effect on an English village if a black man came 

 to it, and a white servant complained that he had been 



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