mselves. These had come hither with a
message of deliverance to all the dark races, and he himself was a
humble mouthpiece of such. But there were many such mouthpieces. They
were everywhere, and were being heard gladly. Who could refuse to hear
them? The people of this land were being oppressed and trampled upon;
and so it was wherever the white man set down his foot. Let them look
at the past. Where were the nations that dwelt proudly in their own
lands? Gone, utterly gone, or slaves to the white man; who planted his
own laws upon them and punished them heavily if they did not obey.

The crafty rascal however found it convenient to ignore the fact that
the worst that the white man had ever done to them was a joke when
compared with the treatment formerly meted out to the black man by his
brother black. Then he proceeded to quote from the Scriptures.

There was a fair sprinkling of _amakolwa_ among his audience, i.e. those
who had been converted to Christianity--of a sort--and these now
listened with renewed zest. They would appreciate his arguments, and
afterwards make them plain to their fellow countrymen not so privileged,
in their discussions from kraal to kraal.

He deftly quoted from the history of the Israelites, and their
deliverance from the Egyptian bondage, making out that these were in
similar bondage, that the promises made to Israel were given to them
too. He went further. He even assured them that they were offshoots of
Israel, cleverly citing numbers of their national and tribal customs,
some obsolete but many still in force, which exactly corresponded with
the precepts of the Mosaic law. The great book of the white men which
revealed the will of Nkulunkulu, he declared, was wrongly so called, in
that it was not revealed to white men at all, but to dark men. The
whites had stolen it, as they stole everything.

A deep bass hum of applause broke from his audience. It was a strange
scene. The vast assemblage held spellbound, the preacher, arrayed as
one who preaches the gospel of peace, instead, swaying this multitude of
dark savages with the gospel of revolt and war, and all the ruthless
atrocity of horror which such represents. All spellbound there in the
clear light of the broad moon, flooding down upon ridge and valley, and
loom of mountain misty against the stars.

For upwards of another hour the preacher went on, the entranced audience
drinking in every word. They could have lis