you said
prayers to One Who sits above the world, and held up a cross of bone to
which a man was tied who wore a cap of thorns? Do you remember how you
kissed the man with the cap of thorns as the spear went into you? You
shake your head--oh! you are a clever liar, but I will show you that you
are a liar, for I have the thing yet," and snatching up a horn which lay
on the kaross beneath him, he blew.

As the peculiar, wailing note that the horn made died away, a woman
dashed out of one of the doorways that I have described and flung
herself on her knees before him. He muttered something to her and she
dashed back again to re-appear in an instant holding in her hand a
yellow ivory crucifix.

"Here it is, here it is," he said. "Take it, White Beard, and kiss it
once more, perhaps for the last time," and he threw the crucifix
to Brother John, who caught it and stared at it amazed. "And do you
remember, Fat Baby, how we caught you? You fought well, very well,
but we killed you at last, and you were good, very good; we got much
strength from you.

"And do you remember, Father of Monkeys, how you escaped from us by your
cleverness? I wonder where you went to and how you died. I shall not
forget you, for you gave me this," and he pointed to a big white scar
upon his shoulder. "You would have killed me, but the stuff in that iron
tube of yours burned slowly when you held the fire to it, so that I had
time to jump aside and the iron ball did not strike me in the heart as
you meant that it should. Yet, it is still here; oh! yes, I carry it
with me to this day, and now that I have grown thin I can feel it with
my finger."

I listened astonished to this harangue, which if it meant anything,
meant that we had all met before, in Africa at some time when men used
matchlocks that were fired with a fuse--that is to say, about the year
1700, or earlier. Reflection, however, showed me the interpretation of
this nonsense. Obviously this old priest's forefather, or, if one put
him at a hundred and twenty years of age, and I am sure that he was not
a day less, perhaps his father, as a young man, was mixed up with
some of the first Europeans who penetrated to the interior of Africa.
Probably these were Portuguese, of whom one may have been a priest
and the other two an elderly man and his son, or young brother, or
companion. The manner of the deaths of these people and of what happened
to them generally would of course be remembered by t