chorus.
"Let us pity the white man;
No mother has he to bring him milk,
No wife to grind his corn."
The reader can fully sympathize with this intelligent and liberal-minded traveller, when he observes, "Trifling as this recital may appear, the circumstance was highly affecting to a person in my situation. I was oppressed with such unexpected kindness, and sleep fled from my eyes. In the morning, I presented my compassionate landlady with two of the four brass buttons remaining on my waistcoat; the only recompense I could make her."
The Duchess of Devonshire, whose beauty and talent gained such extensive celebrity, was so much pleased with this African song, and the kind feelings in which it originated, that she put it into English verse, and employed an eminent composer to set it to music:
The loud wind roar'd, the rain fell fast;
The white man yielded to the blast;
He sat him down beneath our tree,
For weary, faint, and sad was he;
And ah, no wife or mother's care,
For him the milk or corn prepare.
chorus.
The white man shall our pity share;
Alas! no wife, or mother's care,
For him the milk or corn prepare.