A NATIVE ARISTOCRAT. 495 



little way and cast it into the dense vegetation on each side of the path we 

 afterwards knew so well. When the trader reached the next stage he sent 

 back his men to demand the ' stolen ' ivory ; and when the elders denied the 

 theft they were fired upon and five were killed, eleven women and children 

 captured, and also twenty-five goats. The surviving elders then talked the 

 matter over, and the young men pointed out the ivory, and carried it twenty- 

 two miles after the trader. He chose to say that three of the tusks were 

 missing, and carried away all the souls and goats he had captured. They 

 now turned to the only resource they knew, and when Dugumbe passed, way- 

 laid and killed one of his people." 



The natives to the west of Lake Tanganyika are, according to Living- 

 stone, a naturally intelligent and well-favoured race, and exceedingly friendly 

 and well-disposed towards strangers, until they have lost confidence in them 

 through cruelty and ill-usage. The following " lights and shadows " of 

 African life are painfully interesting. He says : — 



" Slaves generally — and especially those on the West Coast at Zanzibar, 

 and elsewhere — are extremely ugly. I have no prejudice against their colour; 

 indeed, any one who lives long among them forgets that they are black, and 

 feels that they are just fellow-men. But the low retreating forehead, prog- 

 nathus jaws, lark heels, and other physical peculiarities common among slaves 

 and West Coast Negroes, always awaken the same feelings of aversion as 

 those with which we view specimens of the ' Bill Sykes ' and ' Bruiser ' class 

 in England. I would not utter a syllable calculated to press down either class 

 more deeply in the mire in which they are already sunk; but I wish to point 

 out that these are not typical Africans any more than typical Englishmen, 

 and that the natives of nearly all the high lands of the interior of the conti- 

 nent are fair average specimens of humanity. I happened to be present 

 when all the head men of the great chief Insama, who lives west of the south 

 end of Tanganyika, had come together to make peace with certain Arabs who 

 had burned their chief town, and I am certain one could not see more finely- 

 formed, intellectual heads in any assembly in London or Paris, and the faces 

 and forms correspond with finely-shaped heads. Insama himself, who had 

 been a sort of Napoleon for fighting and conquering in his younger days, was 

 exactly like the ancient Assyrians sculptured on the Nineveh marbles, as 

 Nimrod and others ; he showed himself to be one of ourselves by habitually 

 indulging in copious potations of beer, called pombe, and had become what 

 Nathaniel Hawthorne called ' bilbous ' below the ribs. I don't know where 

 the phrase ' bloated aristocracy' arose. It must be American, for I have had 

 glimpses of a good few English noblemen, and Insama was the only specimen 

 of a bloated aristocrat on whom I ever set my eyes. 



"Many of the women were very pretty, and, like all ladies, would have 

 been much prettier if they had only let themselves alone. Fortunately, the 



