The little negro, Tojo, asks if she would like some; he takes her by the hand, and leads her into a whole cluster of little round mud huts, telling her that he is Tojo, the king's son; she is his little sister, and these are all his mothers! Which is his real mother Lucy cannot quite make out, for she sees an immense party of black women, all shiny and polished, with a great many beads wound round their heads, necks, ankles, and wrists; and nothing besides the tiniest short petticoats: and all the fattest are the smartest; indeed, they have gourds of milk beside them, and are drinking it all day long to keep themselves fat. No sooner however is Lucy led in among them, than they all close round, some singing and dancing, and others laughing for joy, and crying, "Welcome little daughter, from the land of spirits!" and then she finds out that they think she is really Tojo's little sister, who died ten moons ago, come back again from the grave as a white spirit.
Tojo's own mother, a very fat woman indeed, holds out her arms, as big as bed-posts and terribly greasy, gives her a dose of sour milk out of a gourd, makes her lie down with her head in her lap, and begins to sing to her, till Lucy goes to sleep; and wakes, very glad to see the crocodile as brown and hard and immovable as ever; and that odd round gourd with a little hole in it, hanging up from the ceiling.
CHAPTER VII.
LAPLANDERS.
"It shall not be a hot country next time," said Lucy, "though, after all, the whale oil was not much worse than the castor oil.—Mother Bunch, did your whaler always go to Greenland, and never to any nicer place?"
"Well, Missie, once we were driven between foul winds and icebergs up into a fiord near North Cape, right at midsummer, and I'll never forget what we saw there."
And here beside her was a little fellow with a bow and arrows, such as she had never seen before.