The Baltimore County union. [volume] (Towsontown, Md.) 1865-1909, 1865-04-08
An African Village.

The chief, who, in blackened red shirt
jim Grow hat, dngy trowses, and shoes
trodden down at the heels looked marve-
lously like the cook or the steward of some
coast Of Guinea trader, sat in the green
iron chair and took dinner with us, handing
the bones, half picked, to the favored of
His people as they squatted around and the
meal being concluded, Chapman and l ac-
cepted his invitation to his village the
more readily that we wished him to be
out Of the way when the beads arrived
The town, a few hundred yards more to the
Westward, was a struggling collection OF
cylindro-conical huts each surrounded by a
reed fence fifteen feet or more in height,
and Of no great architectural beauty
Indeed, compared with the carefully built
clay walls, surrounded by the neatly thatch-
ed conical roof, and ornamentcd with de-
signs in colored earth, | had seen at Vaal
River and Thaba Unchu, I was disappoint-
ed with its want of neatness. In the open
central space stood pitched roof shed of
poles and reed, used as q stable before
this was new Trek Touw in process of
stretching. Just beyond were two wagons,
the wheels carefully raised on stones, and
each covered by shed of rough poles to
shield it from the sun @
One of these was his own and the other
that of the late DR.. Holden, and this, from
the tenor of his remarks, it seemed more
and more evident he was greatly inclined
to keep "until the doctor should claim it
himself" His chief objection however, at
present was to get us to make him Dupas
oastilles, Suyman having told him the false
current among the Malays at the Cape re-
specting their efficacy as love charms or
other surgical properties. We assured him
that it was all nonsense, that it was used
only by fine ladies troubled with the vapors,
and by effeminate dandies, and not worthy
the attention of men but all this only in
creased his eagerness, and at last while one
Of his young wives, aslender and elegantly
formed girl in everything except her fea-
lures, pounded up the ingredients upon a
small fat stone, worn hollow with constant
use, we compounded number of the much
desired little perfumed cones and, gave him
one. the smoke of which, carefully inclosed
within his ample kdros, he inhaled as if it
were too precious to lose q Whit of it.
Heaps of ivory nicely calculated as to
size and value were held out to tempt Chap
man to part with the horses, and pair of
VA uOluo III IOCb 1uOuCo III u obl l0lS5
line between the tips, and more than ten
feet in the curve, were sent to the wagon
to be sold for white shirts, washed and
boxed" Not far from the stable was the
kolta, semi-circular palisade of rough
poles dozen or eighteen feet high, and
streaked at about breast height with black
medicine line all round the interior.
In this sat one of the members of the
tribe who had just been brought in by the
returned commander, and among them their
chief a common looking, sharpfeatured lit
tie fellow, whose cunning had often got
him into scrapes from which his courage
could not release him. Once while boy,
he went to steal corn from the garden of
one OF his fathers subjects, and had'ca
fully packed up as much as he could carry,
when buffalo, which had come down for
the very same purpose, charged at once up
on him, and pitched the two-legged thief
such distance as almost to break his neck
and scarcely to leave him strength to crawl
Explorations in Southeast A ltrica, bg
Z. Bdines, f. r. G. S.