THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

133

have beset them, and especially do they portray in gruesome colors the hopeless depravity of the African. I found the people and conditions very much what I aspired to make them, and certainly the natives are not so black as painted, and are peculiarly amenable to gentleness and kindness, and tractable through their vanity and love of power. They are all of one piece of a common humanity.

In their homes and villages the universal evidences of personal familiarity or fel­lowship had something very quaint and unlooked for in its various manifestations. A group of dusky natives equipped for war, while holding their palavers and reviewing their plan of action, would loll one upon another, with hands clasped over the shoul­ders or on the hips of the forward man. The women, too, when convened socially with their swarthy companions, although men and women alike perfectly nude, unencum­bered with any clothing, if quantities of metal and bead belts, fringes, chains, necklaces, bracelets and anklets are excluded from the semblance of such, exhibited a certain fearless freedom, and yet I never witnessed a single indelicate or indecent action.

They have but few manners of evincing affection—spit upon each other in lieu of kissing—and the only embrace I ever witnessed exchanged between brother and sister, man and wife, friend and friend, lover and sweetheart, was a clasping of the hands over the shoulder of the one addressed, a little apparent pressure applied, and a slow draw­ing of the unclasping fingers apart, and in a cat-like way stretching them wider and wider until the muscles grew quite tense; then a gradual drawing together and reclasp­ing, all the while clinging to the shoulder.

They loan their ornaments and charms or medicine necklaces or armlets. They share food, and without let or hindrance participate in their brewed drinks called pombe and tembo. Men, women and children among many tribes carry, slung over their shoul­ders, a gourd ladle, ever ready to help themselves to the beverage as they circulate about from boma to boma. The land is fertile, crops prolific, food in abundance; except when the tsetse fly is a plague, their cattle, sheep, goats, and in some parts donkeys, thrive. They also have vast bee ranges, and make honey and butter, and pound in wooden mortars, with wooden or stone pestles, banana and maize to an impalpable flour. Chickens thrive, but only the eggs, not the fowl, are eaten by the natives, and these, also, when very high, and a spoiled egg with African gourmets is decidedly a pot au feu.

Blacksmiths—fundis—or craftsmen in metal work, have attained great skill, and their products perfection, and throughout Chaga Land the renowned blacksmiths all have been or are celebrated chiefs or sultans, whose deftness in forging spears, knives, pipes, agricultural implements, tools, bells, and most delicate little charms, necklaces, armlets and leglets, as well as various metal ornaments, has given the sultans a dis­tinctive prestige in other spheres of tribal significance. The men are great hunters, and skilled in tanning hides. The women do all the agricultural labor, and herd the cattle and flocks, which are as a rule stall-fed. The fertility of the soil makes their duties far from arduous, and they are happy and content. By a strange reversion of the conventions of civilization, the men do all the needlework, and embroider their own and the women’s bead and metal belts and ornaments, and also do the fighting; and the women are the unmolested purveyors between hostile tribes when they are at war. The young men are great dandies, dawdling about the villages with their hair coiffured in marvelous fashion, their skins stained with yellow clay, and sometimes painted in splotches. Many and various are the dances to signalize certain fetes, or merely to give vent to youthful exuberance. Some exclusively indulged in by one sex or the other, whereas others are participated in together.

Marriage is first by purchase; then by mock capture, which is followed by an atrocious practice. Polygamy existent among them is to my mind a geographical incident—a matter of topographical environment or necessity in a land where there are no workers except slaves or wives, and not prompted by the licentiousness of Oriental countries. A man accumulates more land or more cattle than his first wife can attend to without becoming a toilsome task, he takes another wife, and so on. The