A STINGY WHITE TRADER. 563 



possession, is to me unaccountable. They surel} T do not 

 know, when they write it in their books, that they are 

 declaring they have compromised the honour of English- 

 men. The people receive the offering with a degree of 

 shame, and ladies may be seen to hand it quickly to the 

 attendants, and, when they retire, laugh until the tears 

 stand in their eyes, saying to those about them, " Is that 

 a white man ? then there are niggards among them too. 

 Some of them are born without hearts ! " One white 

 trader, having presented an old gun to a chief, became a 

 standing joke in the tribe : " The white man who made 

 a present of a gun that was new, when his grandfather 

 was sucking his great-grandmother." When these tricks 

 are repeated, the natives come to the conclusion that 

 people who show such a want of sense must be told their 

 duty ; they therefore let them know what they ought to 

 give, and travellers then complain of being pestered with 

 their " shameless begging." I was troubled by impor- 

 tunity on the confines of civilization only, and when I 

 first came to Africa. 



February 4th. — We were much detained by rains, a 

 heavy shower without wind falling every morning about 

 daybreak ; it often cleared up after that, admitting of our 

 moving on a few miles. A continuous rain of several 

 hours then set in. The wind up to this point was always 

 from the east, but both rain and wind now came so 

 generally from the west, or opposite direction to what 

 we had been accustomed to in the interior, that we were 

 obliged to make our encampment face the east, in order 

 to have them in our backs. The country adjacent to the 

 river abounds in large trees ; but the population is so 

 numerous, that those left being all green, it is difficult to 

 get dry firewood. On coming to some places, too, we were 

 warned by the villagers not to cut the trees growing in 

 certain spots, as they contained the graves of their 

 ancestors. There are many tamarind-trees, and another 

 very similar, which yields a fruit as large as a small 

 walnut, of which the elephants are very fond. It is 

 called Motondo, and the Portuguese extol its timber as 

 excellent for building boats, as it does not soon rot in 

 water. 



On the 6th we came to the village of Boroma, which is 

 situated among a number of others, each surrounded by 

 extensive patches of cultivation. On the opposite side 



