d--look, here is the mark of it," and drawing his white hair apart he
showed us a long scar that was plainly visible in the moonlight.

"The blow knocked me senseless just about sunset one evening. When
I came to myself again it was broad daylight and everybody was gone,
except one old woman who was tending me. She was half-crazed with grief
because her husband and two sons had been killed, and another son, a
boy, and a daughter had been taken away. I asked her where my young wife
was. She answered that she, too, had been taken away eight or ten hours
before, because the Arabs had seen the lights of a ship out at sea, and
thought they might be those of a British man-of-war that was known to be
cruising on the coast. On seeing these they had fled inland in a hurry,
leaving me for dead, but killing the wounded before they went. The old
woman herself had escaped by hiding among some rocks on the seashore,
and after the Arabs had gone had crept back to the house and found me
still alive.

"I asked her where my wife had been taken. She said she did not know,
but some others of our people told her that they had heard the Arabs
say they were going to some place a hundred miles inland, to join their
leader, a half-bred villain named Hassan-ben-Mohammed, to whom they were
carrying my wife as a present.

"Now we knew this wretch, for after the Arabs landed at Kilwa, but
before actual hostilities broke out between us, he had fallen sick of
smallpox and my wife had helped to nurse him. Had it not been for her,
indeed, he would have died. However, although the leader of the band,
he was not present at the attack, being engaged in some slave-raiding
business in the interior.

"When I learned this terrible news, the shock of it, or the loss of
blood, brought on a return of insensibility, from which I only awoke
two days later to find myself on board a Dutch trading vessel that was
sailing for Zanzibar. It was the lights of this ship that the Arabs had
seen and mistaken for those of an English man-of-war. She had put into
Kilwa for water, and the sailors, finding me on the verandah of the
house and still living, in the goodness of their hearts carried me on
board. Of the old woman they had seen nothing; I suppose that at their
approach she ran away.

"At Zanzibar, in an almost dying condition, I was handed over to a
clergyman of our mission, in whose house I lay desperately ill for a
long while. Indeed six months went by before I