have been cleared up if they had seen each other. 'How jolly you are, mother. It looks as if you were used to hiding up young chaps-eh, old girl?' 'Ha, ha!' laughed the old woman, when I was young; yes, indeed! Oh, the sport we had when I was young! The boys were much nicer then than they are now; yes, indeed.' 'Sing us a song, mother.' She looked so birdish and perky, he couldn't help asking her to sing. The old lady put down her saucepan, set her arms akimbo, and in a somewhat weak and piping but still sweet and plaintive voice, began the old Welsh air, Blodau'r gorllewin. As her voice faltered out the end of the stanza, another voice took up the strain; the door was wide open; and first one and then another of the villagers dropped into the room, till the bench by the table was crowded; and every one of them took his share in the song, which seemed to be ever beginning, never ending. Gerard rose in his boxbed, beating time to the air; and the old bard, who had come in too, and taken the cushioned chair by the fire, sat with his ancient gray face all ashake, and the tears standing in his rheumy eyes. After the pennil, they had hymns, which were very sweet too; and then the old bard recited a triad with great applause, and had a glass of whisky on the top of it. It was out of a little keg that had been picked up from the wreck; and when all the men had tasted of it, the keg was put away in the box-bed at Gerard's feet; after that, the singing went on faster and more furiously till far into the night; Gerard's last impressions being of a mist of human faces, of a perpetual chime of human voices, and of some one continually fetching out the little keg and putting it back again. If he didn't die of asphyxia, it was his strong constitution that saved him. When he came to himself it was just dawn; two or three men were lying stretched on the floor, their heads in the ashes of the fire; an old cat was blinking and purring on the bench. The door opened, letting in a flood of cold, biting air and chill, dreary daylight: the old seaman who had saved Gerard from the wreck stood there looking in. 'Hollo!' cried Gerard; 'come in, old fellow.' 'There's a tug standing off on the south side of the island; they 've sent a boat ashore for water; they are bound for Aberhirnant, with a ship they have picked up dismasted, and are lying by under the lee of the island till the weather moderates. Would you like to go off to her?' "Yes, I should,' cried Gerard, springing up and hurrying on his clothes, which had been well dried at the fire the day before. I should have liked to have said good-bye to the old lady; but perhaps' 'See her again,' said the old man-see her again; there's no time to lose; come along.' The old woman had wrapped up his arm and shoulder in damp seaweed, and the swelling and pain were now much lessened; indeed, he could touch the arm without its hurting him, and could dress himself easily enough. The sea was moderate under the lee of the island, although wild enough in the open. They got aboard the tug without difficulty, and were presently steaming along with a slapping good wind at their quarter, tugging away at a dismasted ship, which rolled to and fro heavily in the sea. But they were bound for Aberhirnant. TO A FELLED TREE. That used to feed mine eye and heart, Thy limbs are lopped; thy roots are torn; I in the sunshine am forlorn; Undated o'er the murmuring bars; No more to drink the summer's rain; No more to burst in April fringe; To tassel-flower in copious May; The gushing thrush, devoid of art; No more to see the cowslip blow; The violet about thy foot; The pansy o'er thy mossy root; The pebble-rippling runlet flow. No more to overlook the grass Spring freshens to a living hue; No more to drink the Autumn's dew; To drowse as Summer's snow-clouds pass: To dapple, sweet, the daisied sod; To hear the murmurous hum of bees; To sway beneath the boundless blue; They cut you down before the Spring; And while you slept in semi-death; Before you caught the honeyed breath, And saw, with tears, the primrose blow. Printed and Published by W. & R. CHAMBERS, 47 Pater noster Row, LONDON, and 339 High Street, EDINBURGH Also sold by all Booksellers. CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL No. 457. OF POPULAR LITERATURE, SCIENCE, CONDUCTED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS. LIVINGSTONE'S SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1872. Gazal. PRICE 1d. certainty. They have given, we admit, satisfactory DISCOVERIES. reasons why they did not follow the great sweep WHATEVER may be the ultimate result of Dr which the river makes towards the west, and the Livingstone's researches, it is not to be doubted extent of which is still unknown; and though, that his name will be for ever associated with the proceeding northwards, they came to a river, which history of the Nile. He is by far the greatest of they assumed to be the same as that they had left, all modern explorers. He has ventured more, seen they may have been mistaken, for, after parting more, and thrown a clearer light on the hydrog- company with it for a hundred miles, they could raphy of Central Africa, than all his predecessors put not be more sure that they were dealing with the together. Still, a cloud of doubt hangs suspended same stream, than Dr Livingstone in his assumed over the exit of the waters, among whose innumer-identification of the Lualaba with the Bahr-elable springs he has so long wandered; and it is to clear up, once for all, the mystery of their course, that he voluntarily condemns himself to remain an anchorite in unknown wilds and forests, for we know not how many years. He hopes, indeed, to complete his work in two years; but considering how much his previous stay has been protracted, we may fairly conclude that his return within that period is doubtful. Meanwhile, we observe with regret several marks of a disposition to disparage his labours, by attempting to prove that there exists no connection between the streams he has discovered and the river of Egypt. It would be unjust to say that Captains Speke and Grant discovered nothing, because they made us acquainted with the course and character of the Kitangûle, which is certainly one of the feeders of the Nile; but their notion, that the Victoria N'yanza is the source of that river, is as irreconcilable with their own narrative as it is with the science of geography. They saw part of a lake, and heard a great deal about the rest of it; but they neither discovered its dimensions, nor how it is fed, nor how many streams fall into it, nor with what system of lakes it is connected at its southern extremity. All these points are still unknown, and so also is the source of the Kitangûle. Nothing, therefore, could be more unfounded than their pretension to have discovered the source of the Nile. It is highly probable that the stream which runs out of the Victoria N'yanza is one branch, and perhaps a principal branch of the Nile; but as they did not follow its course from the lake to its junction with the Blue River, this probability does not amount to! We are far from deciding dogmatically that the ridge of uplands, and the peaks that tower from their summit, are the Mountains of the Moon; they are situated about eleven degrees south of what Captain Speke assumes to be the Lunar Mountains of Ptolemy; but instead of contenting himself with transient glimpses of these terrene elevations, Dr Livingstone patiently plodded along six hundred miles of the watershed, examining and describing in noble language his impressions of what he saw by the way. He has not beheld the whole, and does not say he has; on the contrary, he tells us that there remains yet a hundred miles of the watershed, and the most important hundred miles, which he has not visited. The reader who remembers the gorgeous picture which Buffon has drawn of the primitive earth, may imagine himself among its wastes and wilds, as he peruses Dr Livingstone's descriptions of the spongy fountains, the morasses, the shallow lakes, hundreds of miles in length, the impenetrable forests which the traveller skirted, the wild buffalo and elephant tracks, in which the unwary wanderer often sinks to the thigh, where the foot of the huge beast has been, the reedy pools, many miles in length, resembling the mangrove swamps on the coast, the tor-like peaks, impending far up among the hills over runnels and fountains yet unvisited. As we have already said, it is not our intention to be positive where the great traveller himself is not after all his researches, he observes very modestly that he may be mistaken, and in that case expresses his readiness to confess his error; but if his own observations, and the testimony of natives whom he knows and trusts, can be relied upon, all the wealth of waters descending from the Lunar Mountains do certainly flow in a northerly direction, whether they ultimately unite with the Egyptian flood or not. The reason he gives for his own belief that it is the great valley in which the united waters flow, sometimes spreading into large lakes, sometimes forming huge lacustrine rivers, is, that the depression is hemmed in by high lands on the west as well as on the east, so that, up to the fourth degree of south latitude at least, he could| perceive nothing to lessen his belief in the junction of the Lualaba with the great western arm of the Nile. Still, when his researches northward were interrupted at the fourth degree of south latitude, he had reached an immense sheet of water, which he calls the unknown lake, terminating, as he was assured by the natives, in extensive reedy swamps, which he persuaded himself must in the end join the Bahr-el-Gazal. approach of a white man, Livingstone advanced to meet him, and, at the head of a small caravan, beheld the stars and stripes flaunting in the African breeze. He was therefore not left to conjecture from what quarter his deliverance was approaching. He is not one of those who care on which side of the Atlantic an Englishman is born, or whether he happens to be called an American or a Scotchman; it is enough that he is one of the leading race among mankind, which he feels himself also to be. The communications of Livingstone himself to the Foreign Office, his letters to the New York Herald, and those of Mr Stanley, giving an account of his proceedings in Africa, have made the public familiar with the leading facts of the case; it is not with these, therefore, that we have to deal, but with some important questions, geographical and physiological, arising out of them. Dr Livingstone is a man of warm and grateful feelings emotional, though not demonstrative; and as he has received numerous benefits from the Africans of the interior, he is naturally disposed to think kindly and judge favourably of them. But kindness is one thing, and science another. Men and women with whom he has for years maintained friendly relations, can hardly appear to him in the same light in which they would be viewed by a new and impartial observer. He tells us himself, that after living for a while among black people, you cease to be conscious that they are black; as by the same metamorphosis of feeling, you cease to be conscious that ugly people are ugly. Men who marry plain women, if they happen to be gifted with a loving disposition, soon forget the want of symmetry in their features, or of proportion in their figure, and, misled by the force of expression, absolutely regard them as beautiful. It seems to us that, under some such influence as this, Dr Livingstone has been betrayed into the entertaining of a far more favourable opinion of the structure and appearance of the Manyema, for example, whom he himself describes as ruthless cannibals, than a physiog nomist would consider defensible. Some travellers have said that the negroes pity us because we are white, and possibly also because our heads are not woolly. There is no accounting for tastes; but among the multitudes of black people whom we have seen and known, no example has occurred of an individual who preferred the negro countenance to that of the European. We are consequently disposed to demur to Dr Livingstone's theory of the physique of Central Africans, whom he looks upon as superior in many respects to our own countrymen, especially such as have applied them Both Captain Grant and Dr Beke have written letters to the Times, in which they maintain that Dr Livingstone's theory is impossible. An eminent German botanist, Dr Schweinfurth, has discovered, they say, the source of that river in five degrees north latitude. But are they or the German botanist quite sure that the Bahr-el-Gazal has but one source? May it not, like the Bahr-el-Abiad, have many springs? so that, without disparaging the botanist's testimony, we may believe in the practicability of conducting the waters of the Lualaba into the Bahr-el-Gazal. But here Dr Beke interposes another obstacle, which he considers insurmountable: the river Uelle traverses, he affirms, the line of march which the Lualaba must follow in its attempt to unite its forces with those of the western branch of the Nile. But with all due respect for the science of travellers whether at home or abroad, we have less faith than Dr Beke in the astronomical observations by which the latitude and longitude of new places and heads of rivers are often determined. The Uelle may follow its occidental track in peace, and yet leave room for the north-eastern course of the Lualaba. However, as, from all these conflicting ideas, it is obvious that certainty has not yet been attained, we persuade ourselves that the public will be content to await the result of Dr Livingstone's final researches, which, whether they establish his previous theory or not, he will assuredly divulge to the world in their utmost completeness. For some time, it is well known, the chief of African travellers was supposed to be dead, his journals lost, his discov-selves to physiological studies. eries handed over to oblivion. Several languid Six years of familiarity with 'thick luscious endeavours were made by the scientific gentlemen lips,' and locks which a poodle might envy, have of this country to discover his fate, or afford him sometimes led him to view us, descendants of the succour if still alive. But causes on which we Vikings and Gauls, from a comic point of view. decline to dwell frustrated their attempts, and it For instance, in the following passage: 'If a comwas left for the correspondent of the New York parison were instituted, and Manyema taken at Herald to explore the explorer, and shew to England random, placed opposite, say, the members of the her bold son displaying the hereditary virtues of Anthropological Society of London, clad like them his race in the untrodden wilds of Central Africa. in kilts of grass-cloth, I should like to take my The name of Mr Stanley, who carried the design of place alongside the Manyema, on the principle of the New York Herald into execution, is now almost preferring the company of my betters-the philas well known as that of Livingstone himself, and osophers would look wofully scraggy. But though respected wherever it is known. The meeting of the inferior race,' as we compassionately call them, the explorer and his deliverer near the banks of the have finely formed heads and often handsome feaTanganyika Lake is characteristic of British cool-tures, they are undoubtedly cannibals. Elsewhere, ness and daring. Informed by a servant of the reasoning in the same vein, he says: 'I happened to be present when all the head men of the great chief, Insama, who lives west of the south end of the 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 corresponded with the finely shaped heads.' The men being fashioned after this type, we naturally inquire what sort of persons are their helpmates? Are they also finely formed, with intellectual heads and elegantly proportioned bodies? Dr Livingstone replies: 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 dears could not change their charming black eyes, beautiful foreheads, nicely rounded limbs, well shaped forms, and small hands and feet. Further on, he adds: 'Cazembe's queen would be esteemed a real beauty, either in London, Paris, or New York. In a village of Upper Egypt, we saw one black beauty with features as regular as those of a Grecian statue, and hair long and flexible as that of a Greek or Englishwoman. Inquiring whence she came, it appeared that no one could tell-somewhere from the interior, was the reply, but from what part of the interior, it was impossible to learn. She had come huddled among a multitude of captive negresses, whom she regarded with as much scorn as if she had been an Iapetian of the purest blood. Could she have been brought from Manyema? The complexion decided in the negative. They, as Livingstone assures us, are of a rich warm brown colour-she was as black as ebony. Leaving this question unsolved, we follow Dr Livingstone in his speculations on the original type of the negro, which, with Winwood Reade, he is inclined to discover in the ancient Egyptian. Here dogmatism would be peculiarly out of place, since investigation has not yet revealed to us who the ancient Egyptians were. The geographers and philosophers of antiquity were of opinion that Africa commenced west of the Nile, at the line which separates the cultivated country from the Desert. The Egyptians, therefore, in their view, were Asiatics, probably of Semitic origin, and closely allied to the Phoenicians and Carthaginians. To study their monuments carefully, and to behold in them indications of a physiological affinity with the African races, we hold to be impossible. Instead of round, they have almond-shaped eyes, with lips rather thin than thick, slender figures, and long, flexible hair. The nose is not depressed, as Winwood Reade supposes, but straight, like that of the Arabs. Occasionally, mummies have been found with red hair; and from among such individuals, victims were occasionally selected, and sacrificed to Typhon. Their opinions, their rites, their ceremonies, their philosophy, their religion, were almost identical with those of the Phoenicians, and never suggest to a philosophical student the slightest trace of African origin. One of the least explicable problems in the science of ethnology is that repugnance to civilisation, or absolute incapacity to profit by its teaching, which, from the beginning of time, has characterised the black races. As far as we can discover, they have always been cannibals; while the masses of the population have as invariably been slaves, whether at home or abroad. An old Greek poet divided mankind into three classes-one consisting of men who could discover truth for themselves; a second, of men who could not discover it for themselves, but could accept it when it had been discovered by others; and a third, who could neither do the one nor the other-whom, in his rough way of speaking, he called 'wretches, without use or value.' We would not apply this language to the black races, nor perhaps would the old poet, if he were required to deliver his opinion in prose; but the fact is certain, that while the nations of Semitic and Iapetian origin have invented a civilisation for themselves, the Africans have remained from time immemorial unimproved, and apparently unimprovable, at least beyond a certain point. When Dr Livingstone returns to this country, and places his matured views before the world, we are persuaded he will introduce many great modifications into his ethnological theory. No one knows better than he that numerous efforts have been vainly made to diffuse the light of knowledge among the African populations by the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Arabs. But the head of the Áfrican has proved impenetrable to the darts of enlightenment, whether social, moral, or religious. Nothing can be more completely removed from the ethical system of civilised mankind than the practice of cannibalism, which, nevertheless, appears to be not naturally repugnant to the interior African. The Manyema women, Dr Livingstone says, keep aloof from the hideous banquets of the men; but in the West India Islands, more especially in Hayti, it is the women who take the lead in the practice of cannibalism, which they carry to its most shocking excess, by devouring their own children. How barbarous nations are to be civilised, seems not yet to have been discovered in modern times. Dr Livingstone describes the result of his own researches as the rediscovery of facts well known to antiquity; and it would be well for us if we could rediscover the methods by which the Greeks and Romans civilised the races among whom they planted colonies. When modern Europeans settle in the midst of savages, they immediately commence the process of extermination, which they generally complete in a period more or less protracted; and when they fail, it is only when the multitudes with whom they have to deal are vastly too numerous to be cut off. The Red Indians of North America have dwindled from fifteen or sixteen millions to about a million and a half, and will soon disappear altogether. The natives of Newfoundland have long ago retreated to the 'happy hunting-grounds,' Where slaves once more their native land behold, No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. So, again, in Tasmania, not a trace remains of its once vigorous and numerous population; the black race is fast dying out in Australia, the cannibal in New Zealand, and if we do not extirpate the Hindus and Mohammedans of India, it is because the effort exceeds our strength. Were it not for this phenomenon, we should exceedingly regret that conquest and annexation were not the result of the Abyssinian war. Once firmly planted in those highlands, and opening commercial relations with the Africans of the interior, the probability is that we should have exerted as beneficial an influence on their minds and manners as they are capable of receiving. When Cazembé-the beauty of whose queen has been above spoken of-had conversed with Dr Livingstone, he said that from the first specimen of the English he had seen, he liked them, and evinced his liking by treating the traveller with much consideration. He might not have liked them so well, had his country become a province of our colonial empire. Commerce, however, quietly insinuates into barbarous populations the good which conquest endeavours to force upon them. The merchant, with a string of blue beads in his hand, is often more potent than a dragoon with his sword. The women befriend the bringer of beads, and the persons whom they befriend are generally able to effect much among savages. Had Abyssinia become the receptacle of all such articles of European manufacture as would be adapted to the tastes of the natives, many of which they have never yet beheld, a peaceable passage would be readily granted through their country to every Englishman. The only races who would have had cause to regret our close vicinity would have been those of the elephant and lion, whom we should certainly have destroyed in a comparatively short space of time. The existence of the lion in any country is an indubitable proof of a low state of civilisation; he had already disappeared from Greece in mythical times; in Persia and in the Nedjed, as well as in India, he maintained his ground to our own day; but he has now become extinct in Asia as well as in Europe; and had we planted ourselves firmly in Central Africa, as we have long done in the south, lions' skins would have become a scarce article in the markets of the world. The necessity of our advent among the cannibals of Manyema is clearly shewn by many passages in Dr Livingstone's letters. The natives are not without industry; they cultivate the soil largely, and have carried the useful arts so far as to be able to smelt iron and copper; yet they have made but small progress in the affairs of social life. There is not a single great chief in all Manyema -no matter what name the different divisions of people bear-Manyema, Balegga, Babire, Bazire, Bakoos-there is no political cohesion, not one king or kingdom. Each head man is independent of every other.' The women play a distinguished part in the business of these countries; they dive for oysters, and are expert in many other kinds of industry. The principal part of the trade is in their hands. Markets are held at stated times, and the women attend them in large numbers, dressed in their best. They are light-coloured, have straight noses, and are finely formed. They are keen traders, and look on the market as a great institution; to haggle and joke, and laugh and cheat, seem the enjoyments of life. The population, especially west of the river, is prodigiously large. Near Lomame, the Bakuss or Bakoons cultivate coffee, and drink it highly scented with vanilla. Food of all kinds is extremely abundant and cheap.' Hereafter, when Dr Livingstone comes to arrange his materials, draw inferences from his own statements, and estimate the value of different facts, he will doubtless be able to paint a consistent picture of the Central Africans, who contrast favourably, as far at least as morals are concerned, with the half-caste Arabs-I mean in Dr Living stone's opinion. In everything which distinguishes man from man they are as inferior to the real Arab as the Chinese is to the Englishman. Their superstitions are the lowest and most grovelling prevalent among the human race. The least benighted among them are Manichæans of the rudest stamp, that is, have conceived some idea of a good spirit and a bad one, and point out a hot spring in one of their valleys as coming up directly from the quarters of the latter. Contrast with these notions the grand simple creed of the Muslims-La illah il Ullah-There is no God but God,' the words in which they express their belief in the unity of the Divine essence. A few years ago, there sprang up a sort of revival among the Arabs of Arabia Proper, who burst into Africa with a comparatively small number of conquering bands, and swept everything before them almost as far south as our settlements; upon which the English bishop of the Cape observed, that he thought it matter of congratulation that the truths of el Islam were thus substituted for the grovelling fetishism of the blacks. But this movement from the East soon slackened, and has left no other trace than increased appetite for marauding and kidnapping among the inferior races, for Dr Livingstone must admit that the people which invariably succumbs to another people are certainly their inferiors. A WOMAN'S VENGEANCE CHAPTER XXXIII.-AN OLD STORY RETOLD. IN spite of Jack's disclaimer, it was, in fact, chiefly owing to himself that that unlooked-for meeting between Arthur and Jenny had been brought about, although he had been ably seconded by Blanche. She had renewed acquaintance with Alice Renn, after long years of intermission, in one of their river expeditions, and had been surprised to find what a ladylike as well as sensible girl she was. They had known one another as children, when the difference of social rank is not much marked; but on her later visits to Swansdale, Blanche had naturally seen but little of the innkeeper's daughter, and what she had heard (although it was nothing but good) had not prepossessed her in her favour. Her pride had resented the notion of there being anything between Arthur and girl in Jenny's position;' and even when her cousin went abroad, she did not forgive the innocent object of his attachment. Of late, she had been still more prejudiced against her, for it had reached her ears that she had been the principal cause of quarrel between Helen and Arthur. It was true that Jack himself defended Jenny in the matter, but the advocacy of a husband in such cases is not always advantageous for the object of his vindication, and Blanche had come down to Swansdale, Jenny's foe. That the edge of her wrath had been in the first place turned away was owing to Mr Glyddon, of whom she had a high opinion, and whose unstinted praise of the girl awoke in her no suspicion of his own regard for the village beauty; what was unbecoming in the squire, would have seemed to her absolutely disreputable in the rector, and her respect for the cloth precluded any such idea. In sober fact, however, Mr Glyddon's encomiums upon Jenny were quite independent of his affection for her. The knowledge of the part she had played with respect to the late Mrs Tyndall—and the silence she continued to keep concerning the latter's behaviour to her, even now when Helen was no |