nder,
who was younger and better-looking than Clapperton; but she had
passed her twentieth year, was fat, and a perfect Turkish beauty,
just like a huge walking water-butt. All her arts were, however,
unavailing on the heart of Lander; she could not induce him to visit
her at her house, although he had the permission of his master.

This gay widow appeared by no means disposed to waste any time by
making regular approaches, like those by which widow Wadman
undermined the outworks, and then the citadel of the unsuspecting
uncle Toby, but she was determined at once to carry the object of her
attack by storm.

The widow Zuma attempted in the first place to ingratiate herself
with the Europeans, by sending them hot provisions every day in
abundance, during their stay at Wawa. She calculated very justly,
that gratitude is the parent of love, and therefore imagined that as
the Europeans could not be otherwise than grateful to her, for the
delicacies, with which she so liberally supplied them, it would soon
follow as a natural consequence, that their hearts would overflow
with love; at all events it was not to be supposed, that both master
and man could remain callous to the potency of her corporeal charms.
Finding, however, that the hearts of the Europeans were much like the
rocks of her native land, perfectly impenetrable, she had recourse to
another stratagem, which is generally attended with success. In the
enlightened and civilized country of Europe, or at least in that part
of it called England, it is by no means an obsolete custom, for an
individual, who wishes to ingratiate himself with the object of his
affections, to bestow a valuable present on the waiting woman or
abigail, who is a great deal about her person, and the eulogiums
which she then passes upon the absent lover, are great and exuberant
in proportion to the extent of the bribe. A female, whoever she may
be, whether a Middlesex virgin, or a Wawa widow, delights not only to
have some one to whom she can speak of the object of her attachment,
but who will be continually speaking to her of him, and as it appears
that the female character is very nearly the same in the interior of
Africa, as in the latitude of London, it is by no means a matter of
surprise, that the amorous widow enlisted Pascoe, the black servant
of Clapperton, in her cause, by offering him in the way of a bribe, a
handsome female slave as a wife, if he would manage to bring about an
interv