XXIII 
A NARROW ESCAPE 
Although things were pleasant on the whole, 
serious illness, the rude alarms of war, and 
many other things often broke suddenly in on 
the quiet routine of our daily life. Of all our un¬ 
pleasant experiences in Abeokuta, the most ter¬ 
rible was a Dahomian alarm. It was the settled 
custom of the king of Dahomey to make an an¬ 
nual excursion with a large army and to take and 
destroy some town distant from his capital. The 
very old and the very young were butchered, but 
any other captives were carried away to be sold 
as slaves or to be offered in sacrifice to the manes 
of the king’s father. In this way many thou¬ 
sands of people miserably perished every year 
and the name “ Dahomee” was associated in the 
minds of the people of neighboring nations with 
everything ferocious and terrible. 
It was not a mitigating circumstance, that a 
large corps of the Dahomian army was composed 
of amazons, for these female warriors were noth¬ 
ing better than human tigers. One of their 
favorite amusements was to see which of them 
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