“Then the eldest of the three young men said, ‘This milk is mine because I am the eldest.’ ‘No,’ said the second, ‘it is mine because I thought of crying, Hu! hu!’ ‘No, no,’ cried the third, ‘I mean to drink it, for I am armed with a spear, and you have only sticks.’
“Just then a marabout passed by. ‘Let him be the judge!’ said the disputants, and they put their case before him.
“‘I know of nothing in the Koran which applies to your difficulty,’ said the holy man; ‘but show me the milk.’ He took the milk, he looked at it, he drank it. ‘This is really good milk,’ he added, ‘but there is nothing about your case in the Koran that I know of.’”
With two other vocabularies of Gurma and Bozo expressions, less complete than those of the Songhay and Fulah languages, we made up a total of more than ten thousand new words, to which we added many very interesting grammatical remarks.
This absorbing occupation, which fortunately became a positive monomania with some of us, contributed more than anything to our being able to survive the last month of our stay at Fort Archinard.
OUR QUICK-FIRING GUN.
NATIVES OF SAY.