down by the weight of their
dead and dying companions, every now and then make the whole mass heave
in their smothering agonies.

The Bakwains often killed between sixty and seventy head of large game
at the different hopos in a single week; and as every one, both rich and
poor, partook of the prey, the meat counteracted the bad effects of an
exclusively vegetable diet. When the poor, who had no salt, were forced
to live entirely on roots, they were often troubled with indigestion.
Such cases we had frequent opportunities of seeing at other times, for,
the district being destitute of salt, the rich alone could afford to
buy it. The native doctors, aware of the cause of the malady, usually
prescribed some of that ingredient with their medicines. The doctors
themselves had none, so the poor resorted to us for aid. We took the
hint, and henceforth cured the disease by giving a teaspoonful of salt,
minus the other remedies. Either milk or meat had the same effect,
though not so rapidly as salt. Long afterward, when I was myself
deprived of salt for four months, at two distinct periods, I felt no
desire for that condiment, but I was plagued by very great longing for
the above articles of food. This continued as long as I was confined
to an exclusively vegetable diet, and when I procured a meal of flesh,
though boiled in perfectly fresh rain-water, it tasted as pleasantly
saltish as if slightly impregnated with the condiment. Milk or meat,
obtained in however small quantities, removed entirely the excessive
longing and dreaming about roasted ribs of fat oxen, and bowls of cool
thick milk gurgling forth from the big-bellied calabashes; and I could
then understand the thankfulness to Mrs. L. often expressed by poor
Bakwain women, in the interesting condition, for a very little of
either.

In addition to other adverse influences, the general uncertainty, though
not absolute want of food, and the necessity of frequent absence for the
purpose of either hunting game or collecting roots and fruits, proved
a serious barrier to the progress of the people in knowledge. Our own
education in England is carried on at the comfortable breakfast and
dinner table, and by the cosy fire, as well as in the church and school.
Few English people with stomachs painfully empty would be decorous at
church any more than they are when these organs are overcharged. Ragged
schools would have been a failure had not the teachers wisely provided
food for