urst at the memory of little
voices and manly tones--not silent in death, but worse than that--gone,
gone _for ever_! Doubtless they felt though they never heard of, and
could not in words express, the sentiment--

"Oh for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still."

Yoosoof knew not of, and cared nothing for, such feelings as these. We
ask again, how could he? His only experience of the negro was when
cowering before him as a slave, or when yelling in agony under his
terrible lash, or when brutalised and rendered utterly apathetic by
inhuman cruelty.

Harold learned, that night on further conversation with the Manganja
men, that a raid had recently been made into those regions by more than
one band of slavers, sent out to capture men and women by the Portuguese
half-castes of the towns of Senna and Tette, on the Zambesi, and that
they had been carrying the inhabitants out of the country at the rate of
about two hundred a week.

This however was but a small speck, so to speak, of the mighty work of
kidnapping human beings that was going on--that is _still_ going on in
those regions. Yoosoof would have smiled--he never laughed--if you had
mentioned such a number as being large.

But in truth he cared nothing about such facts, except in so far as they
represented a large amount of profit accrueing to himself.

The result of Harold Seadrift's cogitations on these matters was that he
resolved to pass through as much of the land as he could within a
reasonable time, and agreed to accompany Chimbolo on a visit to his
tribe, which dwelt at some distance to the north of the Manganja
highlands.

CHAPTER NINE.

IN WHICH A SAVAGE CHIEF ASTONISHES A SAVAGE ANIMAL.

There is something exceedingly pleasant in the act of watching--
ourselves unseen--the proceedings of some one whose aims and ends appear
to be very mysterious. There is such a wide field of speculation opened
up in which to expatiate, such a vast amount of curious, we had almost
said romantic, expectation created; all the more if the individual whom
we observe be a savage, clothed in an unfamiliar and very scanty garb,
and surrounded by scenery and circumstances which, albeit strange to us,
are evidently by no means new to him.

Let us--you and me, reader,--quitting for a time the sad subject of
slavery, and leaping, as we are privileged to do, far ahead of our
explorers Harold Seadrift and his company, into the regio