coward."

Now men held their breaths, waiting to see this fool led away to die by
torture of the ant-heap or some other dreadful doom. But the prince only
answered:

"Soldier, you are drunk, therefore I forgive you your words. Whether He
Whom you blaspheme will forgive you, I know not. Get you gone!"

The warriors stared and murmured, for by those words, wittingly or
unwittingly, their general had confessed his faith, and that day they
made ribald songs about him in the camp. But on the morrow when they
learned how that the man whom the prince spared had been seized by
a lion and taken away as he sat at night with his companions in the
bivouac, his mouth full of boasting of his own courage in offering
insult to the prince and the new faith, then they looked at each other
askance and said little more of the matter. Doubtless it was chance, and
yet this Spirit Whom the Messenger preached was one of Whom it seemed
wisest not to speak lightly.

But still the trouble grew, for by now the witch-doctors, with Hokosa
at the head of them, were frightened for their place and power, and
fomented it both openly and in secret. Of the women they asked what
would become of them when men were allowed to take but one wife? Of the
heads of kraals, how they would grow wealthy when their daughters ceased
to be worth cattle? Of the councillors and generals, how the land could
be protected from its foes when they were commanded to lay down the
spear? Of the soldiers, whose only trade was war, how it would please
them to till the fields like girls? Dismay took hold of the nation, and
although they were much loved, there was open talk of killing or driving
away the king and Nodwengo who favoured the white man, and of setting up
Hafela in their place.

At length the crisis came, and in this fashion. The Amasuka, like many
other African tribes, had a strange veneration for certain varieties
of snakes which they declared to be possessed by the spirits of their
ancestors. It was a law among them that if one of these snakes entered
a kraal it must not be killed, or even driven away, under pain of death,
but must be allowed to share with the human occupants any hut that
it might select. As a result of this enforced hospitality deaths from
snake-bite were numerous among the people; but when they happened in
a kraal its owners met with little sympathy, for the doctors explained
that the real cause of them was the anger of some ancestral spirit
t