chattel, and how much his life is spent in the mere safeguarding
of his main asset, _i. e._, himself. There are actually districts in
Africa where _three_ natives cannot be sent on a message, in case two
should combine and sell the third before they return.

WHITE ANTS

From 'Tropical Africa'

The termite or white ant is a small insect, with a bloated,
yellowish-white body, and a somewhat large thorax, oblong-shaped, and
colored a disagreeable oily brown. The flabby, tallow-like body makes
this insect sufficiently repulsive, but it is for quite another reason
that the white ant is the worst abused of all living vermin in warm
countries. The termite lives almost exclusively upon wood; and the
moment a tree is cut or a log sawn for any economical purpose, this
insect is upon its track. One may never see the insect, possibly, in
the flesh, for it lives underground; but its ravages confront one at
every turn. You build your house perhaps, and for a few months fancy
you have pitched upon the one solitary site in the country where there
are no white ants. But one day suddenly the door-post totters, and
lintel and rafters come down together with a crash. You look at a
section of the wrecked timbers, and discover that the whole inside is
eaten clean away. The apparently solid logs of which the rest of the
house is built are now mere cylinders of bark, and through the
thickest of them you could push your little finger. Furniture, tables,
chairs, chests of drawers, everything made of wood, is inevitably
attacked, and in a single night a strong trunk is often riddled
through and through, and turned into matchwood. There is no limit, in
fact, to the depredation by these insects, and they will eat books, or
leather, or cloth, or anything; and in many parts of Africa I believe
if a man lay down to sleep with a wooden leg, it would be a heap of
sawdust in the morning. So much feared is this insect now, that no one
in certain parts of India and Africa ever attempts to travel with such
a thing as a wooden trunk. On the Tanganyika plateau I have camped on
ground which was as hard as adamant, and as innocent of white ants
apparently as the pavement of St. Paul's; and wakened next morning to
find a stout wooden box almost gnawed to pieces. Leather portmanteaus
share the same fate, and the only substances which seem to defy the
marauders are iron and tin.

But what has this to do with earth or with agriculture? The most
important