"Lieutenant Fegan led a gallant resistance."
STORIES FROM AFRICA.
VIII.—SOME MEN WHO WON THE BLESSING.
LEAVE the work with you,' said Livingstone in the Senate House at Cambridge, after speaking in burning words of the needs of Africa. He went back himself to the land from which he returned only to his grave in Westminster Abbey, and around the slab in the nave which bears his name, we read his words to those who should take up the work he left them: 'May Heaven's rich blessing come down on every one, American, English, Turk, who will help to heal this open sore of the world.'
The 'open sore' was the traffic carried on in those days, without let or hindrance, in the great slave-market of Zanzibar. The crowds of men, women, and children who were paraded up and down, examined, and bargained for, and then taken across to the clove plantations in Pemba, or kept as domestic slaves in Zanzibar, were brought from the interior by the Arabs, the great slave-dealers of East Africa. Sometimes a native village had been attacked and set on fire, some of the inhabitants shot down among their blazing huts, and the rest carried off. Sometimes the Arabs would settle for some time in a neighbourhood for elephant-hunting, and, when they had secured as much ivory as they required, would stir up a quarrel between two villages and offer their powerful aid to one side or the other, on condition of receiving all the prisoners in payment. Then came the horrible journey to the coast. The luckless slaves were yoked in gangs, often with their necks fastened into forked sticks. The sick or feeble, unable to keep up with the rest, were either killed or left to the mercy of wild beasts. Babies, whose mothers were hindered by their weight, were flung aside upon the terrible track. Those who reached the coast alive were packed in the hold of a slave-dhow, and, after enduring untold miseries upon the voyage, were sold in the market of Zanzibar. No wonder that the sight of such things as these roused the loving heart of Livingstone to a white heat of indignation, and sent him home to infect his countrymen with his own anger.