Whether this incident in the history of our species is to be altogether deplored, I do not feel competent to decide. True, the perfection of the gorilla form and the purity of its traits were preserved. We remained at the head of the animal creation, unequalled in our combination of beauty and strength; but might we not by this profferred alliance have been elevated? Might we not have hoped to add to all our other superiority the beauty and the power of wings? Might we not have become as the angels—nay, very angels ourselves? Might not we, instead of poor, feeble, pusillanimous man, have furnished the traits which were to be sublimed into the forms of archangels and ministering spirits? Might not we have become seraphs and our children cherubs? Man has his Raphael, as he has his Darwin, whose imagination framed from things actual things impossible—winged men and pin-feathered man-children—creatures never known on Earth or in Heaven. But the Darwin himself is my authority for telling you that, if our kinswoman had yielded to her winged suitor, the Raphael would have only needed to paint gorilla portraits. Think of the change, the superiority, as well in beauty as in truthfulness, that would have been made in his works if female caprice had not prevented this application of the principle of sexual selection? This, however, was not to be; and that it was not, is one of those mysterious dispensations at which we must wonder, but to which we are taught that we must thankfully submit.

This affair, strange to say, had a direct influence in the development of that singular and enfeebled variety of our species known as Man. Our kinswoman was more set by it than ever before in her aversion to all other suitors, and in her devotion to the one object of her love. The momentary clasp of his arms, and his defence of her against another suitor not only bound her to him more strongly than before, but seems to have developed in her a strange faculty which never was known before in any of our species, and which has never appeared in any other in the direct line. Her solitary wanderings were now more limited in extent than they were before this remarkable occurrence. Her experience of the desert kept her within the line of sand which she sometimes approached, but never passed again. Yet she continued to muse alone, and constantly upon the one theme, her strong, thick coat of hair, now become odious to her, and how it might be softened and diminished. Pining away in her despair, she leaned one day against a tree, and remained there for a long time wrapped in sad reverie. Coming to herself again, she was about to continue her walk, when she found that she could not move away. Her arm, from the shoulder to the elbow, stuck fast to the tree. It was a gum-tree, and she had not seen that a broad stream of thick, half-dried gum was on that part of the trunk against which she leaned. The hair on the outside of her arm had been imbedded in the gum, which, drying as she leaned, held her fast, a prisoner. She looked about for help. None was near, not even that cold and cruel gorilla who had told her that he could not love her. Nothing was left but to tear herself away by main strength. Summoning all her fortitude and her force, she threw herself forward and fell upon the ground with a scream that might have been heard afar off, for she had torn out by the roots every hair that had touched the tree.

For many days she suffered in her loneliness; but her pain passed gradually away. But then came the depressing thought that she must now be more repulsive than before, a mutilated creature, with a bare patch on one arm, from the shoulder to the elbow. At first this was worse to bear than the pain of the injury; but ere long she was led from despair to hope by a strange way of thinking which man calls reason, which I have mentioned before, and which I am happy to say is unknown to gorillas; and the consequence of which, in this case, will cause you all to sympathize with me in my felicitations. The thought that if the object of her love longed for a female with a coat softer and finer and sparser than his own, he might, as she said, therefore (but who of us can tell what therefore means?), possibly like one better yet who had no hairy coat at all. And she thought, too, that as she had deprived herself by accident of a small part of her coat, she might (using again the unmeaning word) therefore get rid of the whole of it intentionally by the same means. “At least,” she said, “I shall be in no worse condition than I am now, as far as he is concerned, and what do I care for the others? And if I die, there is but one gone that cares little to remain.” She went to the tree. The gum had flowed again; and in like manner, and with like pain as before, she bared her lower arm of hair. Thus she went on, week after week, as she could endure the torment, and find gum-trees in their flow, until at last she had bared her whole body.

During this process she kept herself more secluded than ever, lest by chance he to please whom she suffered should see her before her sacrificial transformation was complete. She shuddered at the thought of his catching her half made up, in a sort of grand fleshly deshabille. Fortune favored her, and no one saw her until her whole body was as smooth as the inside of her hand. Then she restrained her impatience, and fed and nursed herself with a care she had not taken for many months, that she might regain all the litheness and the grace that she felt that she had lost. Even when she thought that she had gained all this (but how little seemed the all!), she hesitated and kept shyly to herself for many days—a foolish backwardness, of which I am sure no young gorilla lady before me would be guilty! But at last, feeling that nothing more was to be gained by delay, and that her fate might as well be decided first as last, she sallied forth.

Fortune favored her again; for she soon saw at a short distance the object of her search. At first she started to run to him; but hardly had she taken a few steps when she hesitated, halted, and finally turned away, overcome by a feeling entirely new to her. She had been for many weeks preparing herself, through pain and care, to please this very male gorilla, whom in former days she waited on and cooed to and coaxed, without a thought except of the pleasure she had and the pleasure she hoped for, although in vain. But now that she had some reason to hope that she would find the favor that she longed for, she shrunk within herself and feared to offer him that which it was her only desire in life that he should want and take.

With that change in her mind that made her say “therefore,” there had come another in her soul that made her say the still stranger words, “I am ashamed.” And so she turned away from him whom she had set out to find. But before she turned he had caught sight of her; and, struck by such a strange object as an entirely smooth-skinned female of his race, he immediately followed her. She fled, spurred on by her strange, conflicting apprehensions—first, lest he should like her, next, lest he should not. He gained upon her rapidly and soon came up with her, and she sank upon the ground before him. He stood and looked at her, and she saw that there was no recognition in his eyes; but there was something else that repaid her for that loss—admiration; and presently he and her heart began to dance together. He, the lazy, listless fellow of former days, leaped and curvetted like a young antelope. He bounded his full height into the air, he roared with that enchanting roar of his, he beat his breast, he ran up to the top of an enormous tree, and came near killing her by flinging himself down so close to her that had she not swayed lightly aside, he would have dashed her to pieces. But never was a female before in so precious a peril; and as he stood before her, panting with exertion, she sidled up to him, and, laying her head upon his shoulder, and taking his hands, she led them lightly and tenderly over her soft, smooth limbs and body, that, all unknown to him, had suffered such torment for his delight. After that, as men would say, she was his’n and he was her’n. This is the kind of language that they call poetical.

She did not tell him that she was the same old girl that had made love to him before. That secret she kept very profoundly and deceitfully hidden in her own bosom, until it was brought out by another incident that has a direct bearing upon our subject. She was just about to bring forth the first fruit of their happiness, and he was off gathering the daintiest food that he could find for her, when she thoughtlessly strolled near the edge of the sandy desert, and walked along it, musing to herself and wondering if her child would be as handsome as its father, when suddenly she looked up, and there, at a short distance from her, stood the great ostrich who had before persecuted her with his attentions. He darted toward her; and she, fleeing as rapidly toward her cave as her condition would permit, was soon met again by the same defender as before, who this time, after a brief contest, slew the ostrich before her eyes. The effect of this shock was that that night her child was born. It was the most remarkable birth in the history of our race; yet not of our race, for it was not a gorilla that she produced; and here began the new departure. It was a male child which, to look forward a few years, had not the hind thumb of his mother but the toe of his father, and had even less and finer hair than he, and besides (a trait which his mother attributed to her critical encounter with the ostrich), he walked constantly erect, and with straight legs, like that large, feathered biped. Moreover, he inherited from his mother those strange thoughts, “therefore” and “I am ashamed.”

Then, explaining her terror to the father of the child whose birth it had hastened, she confessed to him, she was almost obliged to confess, that she was the poor girl who had loved him so long, and whom he had protected before against the too ardent courtship of the same suitor; he could hardly believe his ears, and his curiosity was excited to know the manner of her transformation. At first she refused to tell; but he asked her again and again; and after some months had passed and she had brought forth her second child—this time a girl, with a smooth body, like herself, and without a hind thumb, like the father, and with the straight, ostrich-way of walking, in a moment of female triumph at this charming success of the principle of development, and of the greater principle of sexual selection, she confessed to what artifice she owed her hairless skin.

He was now naturally not with her so much as during the first months of their union, and his behavior toward her was more placid and serene. Every gorilla matron among my hearers must have had the same experience. Pursuit must always be more or less eager; possession must always be more or less quiet. And if any of my lady hearers have been dissatisfied or disturbed by the manifestation of this inevitable and eternal truth—[Here there was a movement among the females, and one rose and shrieked out, “Disturbed! dissatisfied! To be sure we are. You’re all a set of brutes. Sea-serpents, and hippopotamuses, and ostriches are nothing to you!” The males just turned their heads with bland, pitying smiles, and then gave their attention again to the lecturer, who continued]—if, I say, they have been dissatisfied or disturbed by the manifestation of this inevitable and eternal truth, to which the relations of male and female are merely not an exception, they only show that they expect that the operations of laws of nature will be suspended for the gratification of their pride. During one of his absences, in the still noon of a summer’s day, she heard a faint scream in the distance. But, faint as it was, it seemed unlike those that are sometimes heard in the forest solitudes, and yet like a sound she remembered to have heard before, she could not recollect when or where. In the course of a few weeks it was explained, when one day he appeared, accompanied by another smooth-skinned gorilla girl, who she saw at once was one of those whose love he had before despised, and who was now his wife. To be brief, he found that of the ten who had devoted themselves to him, and who had vowed to have no other love, only three had yielded to the courtship of his rivals, and the remaining six he persuaded to qualify them selves for his admiration, and the nuptials which they had so long and so eagerly coveted. They all illustrated equally well with his first wife the beautiful principles of development and sexual selection, and soon he was surrounded with a large and growing family of smooth-skinned, hind-thumbless, erectly-walking children, of whom the males chiefly said, “therefore,” and the females, “I am ashamed.”

The appearance of this new family in the gorilla country caused a profound sensation throughout our species. The tradition of the sea-serpent alliance and its deplorable consequences were remembered and discussed. The conservative feeling was fully aroused. A mass-meeting, in the nature of a general conseil de famille, was held; and it was finally decided that, to prevent confusion and the deterioration of the race (for what consequences might not be apprehended from female fancy for smooth-skinned, hind-thumbless lovers, who walked like ostriches! what wide-spread disaster might not ensue upon the application of the principle of sexual selection under these new circumstances!), that this new family of non-descript creatures, who, whatever they might be, were certainly not gorillas, should be driven from our borders. Whatever might have been the wishes of the new family in this regard, they (most of them being yet of tender years) could not resist such a determination on the part of a whole tribe, and they submitted. The world was before them where to choose; and they chose to go northward toward the borders of the great sea. Ere long they were seen moving in that direction, the father of the family lounging listlessly in his old way in advance, the females following, carrying the provender and such of the children as were too small to walk. And thus began the first migration. This was the first step in the Fall of Man, which he, in one of those traditions of which I spoke, has embodied and perverted into a tale which he calls, and well calls, “The Expulsion from Paradise.”

One of the most ruinous steps in the descent of this new species, which gradually deteriorated until it became Man and produced the Darwin, was the living in what they call huts or houses, which, as you all know, are a kind of small, movable cave, very hot and dry, and shut up against the air. This, men like the Darwin say, became necessary to protect them against the inclemency of the weather. There was no such necessity. On the contrary, it is the use of this contrivance which has made the new creature weak, unable to live naturally like his ancestor, the gorilla, and obliged him to go on year after year, and generation after generation, adding impediment to impediment, and incumbrance to incumbrance, that he may supply artificial wants which grow upon him year by year, till at last—the poor besotted creature! he deems that one of his species happiest who has most possessions, that is, most occasion of care and trouble. His hut he has at last deprived of the only good quality it once possessed, its movableness (for it would be a nice thing to be able to take your cave around with you when food becomes scarce, instead of being obliged to go after the food and then return to the cave); and, in his self-delusion, he now builds it of some heavy, immovable material, and fills it so full of all kinds of gim-cracks that his highest praise of one of these immovable caves is that it is filled with all the modern inconveniences; and, to keep these in disorder, he has a rapacious multitude of his own species whom he calls carpenters, and masons, and painters, and plumbers. These sorts of man seem to have come into his family through some operation of the law of sexual selection with the bird family; for they are all dreaded because of their bills; and of them all, I am told the plumber’s bill is at once the most dreadful, and the most inscrutable in its origin.

As I have told you, the hut or house was not first used for protection against cold and wet. It came in this wise. Many generations after the first migration a female of the new family was born much lighter in color than the original rich black tint of the species; and when she grew up, she preserved this unpleasant peculiarity. But, strange to say, she was liked by one of the largest and strongest of her species, who took her for his third wife, and made much of her. She, observing that things turned black in the sun, took a notion that unless she could be protected against his rays she also would become black, and lose the peculiar charm to which she owed her marriage to so desirable a husband, and his very marked admiration and attention; and yet she could not bear a cave; it was altogether too damp and gloomy, and, indeed, very unbecoming to the complexion. She therefore insisted with much pouting and sulkiness, including some secret slaps and pinches of the other wives’ children, and alternate fits of temper and sickness that turned the family topsy-turvy (the good old gorilla family discipline, ladies, which permitted the use of a stick not larger than the husband’s hind thumb having sadly deteriorated among these degenerate creatures), that if her husband really loved her and cared anything to preserve the beauty he professed so much to admire, he would make something that would protect her skin against the sun.

After long cogitation he produced a wonderful structure. He took three dry saplings, about one-half again taller than himself, and putting one end of each in the ground, about his own length apart, he joined their tops, and upon the outside of these he piled dried twigs and broad leaves, leaving an opening in the front. To this he led his now radiant beauty, and she took possession with great glee and greater pride. At first she stayed in it all the time, night and day. She allowed no one else but her husband to enter. The other wives affected great scorn of her and her rubbish-hole, as they called it, which they would not go near or seem to notice; but if their children came to peep in, she drove them away with blows and sticks and stones. It was her delight to sit just within the doorway, and nod with condescending affability to the other females who came to see the great curiosity; and they came from miles around.

Her pride, and the airs she took upon herself, set the whole female community agog. She was a wife for whom the wonderful hut had been built to preserve her complexion. She held up her nose in the air, as if the earth and the other females on it were too mean for her to look upon. In the course of a few days the first wife began to make things very uncomfortable. [“Very proper of her,” screamed one of the matrons—an exclamation which was followed by a hum of approval.] She spanked her three children, of whom she had been very fond, on various pretexts; but in her heart, the boys, because they were boys and looked like their father, and the girl, because she was his favorite and looked like herself. She took no notice of her husband, but passed him in glum silence [“Served him right,” screamed another matron]; in this (mildly continued the lecturer) showing the proverbial tact and wisdom of her sex; for the only consequence was that he passed more time than ever at the hut. At last, one evening, when he had brought her some very fine fruit, she flung it down untasted, and went into a kind of convulsion. She screamed, she chattered, she clenched her hands, and gnashed her teeth, and flung herself upon the ground, kicking and tossing her arms about. At first he was inclined to administer to her the remedy which she had applied to the children; but, as he really loved her, he was weak, and asked what was the matter. At first, there was no answer, only more screams, more kicking, more flinging of the arms about. At last, however, it came: “The matter? Her complexion was the matter!” (She was as black as a crocodile’s back.) “How could he expect her not to have fits, unprotected as she was from the sun? But what did her complexion matter? What did he care about that? Why did he not go to his other wife? She could have a hut built for her, where she could sit and sneer at every one else.” The consequence, ladies, you all know. She also had her hut, in the door of which she sat with her nose in the air. And of this the consequence was that the second wife’s complexion also needed protection; and soon she too had her hut, and sat with her nose in the air. Whereupon there was great commotion in the whole community. Was it to be endured that that fellow’s wives should sit in huts and sniff? Would a husband of any spirit, not to say a husband who cared anything for his wives, endure that? There was an outbreak of complexion fever among all the females. Such a thing as a complexion was never before heard of; but now every female had one; and nothing would preserve it, or save her from convulsions, but a hut for its protection. And it was remarkable that the blacker the female the more sensitive she became on this subject, and the more imperatively necessary it was that she should be provided with shelter. And so, ere long, it came to pass that a hut ceased to be any distinction whatever, and that, when all the females got what they wanted, the chief value it was to have had in their eyes was entirely gone, and it would only have been a mark of destitution to be without one. The thing having become a necessity, and a matter of course, the males, to save trouble, made huts large enough for all their females; and as time went on they plastered the twigs and leaves with clay. The males passed more and more time with their females in these she contrivances, and became themselves, of course, more and more effeminate. And thus it was that this new branch of our family became more and more a house-dwelling species.

It is well known to you that some members of our kindred, although degenerate family, man, live upon the water, and go about upon it in a kind of cave with wings. Such folly is incomprehensible to a thorough-bred and high-toned gorilla, who is eminently conservative, and likes to stand upon a solid foundation; and how any people who are in the slightest degree connected with us can seek, or endure, a life upon that shifting and cruel element that is the proper habitation of fishes and crocodiles and hippopotamuses, we cannot surmise, or could not, were it not for our newly-acquired knowledge of the working of the principle of sexual selection, that great newly-found key to all the mysteries of life.

The first sailors were not gorillas, or their puny descendants, but squirrels; and it was through the squirrel that the sailor element was transposed into man’s nature. It happened many ages ago, at least as many ages as had passed since the occurrence of the events which I have narrated and explained, that a community of the new species dwelt on the borders of a great lake. In search of food, or for other purposes, they often had need to go from one side of the lake to the other, and they were always obliged to go around, because they could not go across. It was too far to swim, and there was no other way. But one day a female, who had been obliged to carry her youngest child half around the shore and back again two or three times, saw a squirrel shoving a large piece of bark into the water. He had shaped the bark with his teeth, making the sides even, and the ends somewhat pointed. It was about twice the length of his own body, and that was nearly the height of this female; for squirrels were then not the puny things they are in these degenerate days. When he had launched his bark, he got upon it, settled himself well in the middle, and then suddenly raised his tail. The wind blew gently from shore, and wafted him out upon the water, and gradually across it, he acting as mast, sail, rudder, crew, and passenger; and she saw him disappear, a bounding speck upon the opposite side. At first she wished that she, too, had a long, flat, bushy tail; but the traditions of the dreadful tail-period of our common ancestors lingered with her family, and she shrank from the thought. Then she thought that two or three large palm-leaves would do as well as the tail, or better.

The next day she left her children in the hut, and, coming down to the lake, she shaped a piece of bark, and, taking her place upon it, hoisted two palm-leaves. The wind blew more briskly on this day than on the other, and she was delighted at soon finding herself carried well out upon the lake. But as she went on, and the breeze freshened, she was surprised to find that her bark wobbled unpleasantly from side to side, and even from end to end. The shores of the lake seemed alternately to rise up into the heavens and to descend to the centre of the earth. She was pitched forward and pitched backward. Ere long her surprise soon took the form of disgust, and the seat of the disgust soon shifted from her head to her stomach. The sensation was equally novel and awful. She felt herself grow green about the mouth; and, female although she was, she had no concern about this change in her appearance. Each hair on her head seemed to shrink from its neighbor. She broke into a cold sweat. Her limbs relaxed; and the palm-leaves went overboard. She wished that she might die; and suddenly she thought she was dying, for the hearty breakfast that she had eaten, to set her up for her voyage, was cast out into the treacherous waters—an awful catastrophe! She gave herself up for lost, and, without strength or will to cling to her bark, flung herself along it, and hoped that the end would soon come. It did come, but not as she expected that it would. Being no longer able to keep her balance, she leaned too much on one side, just as a large wave struck the bark upon the other, and she was upset into the water. The shock revived her, and, being not yet very far from land, she was just able to swim back to the shore whence she had started. Creeping up on the bank, she sat a while musing in the sun, and then went meekly home.

Thinking over her adventure, she compared her performance with that of the squirrel, and came to the conclusion that her race needed the infusion of some new blood to fit them for the struggle for existence upon the water-side, and—loathsome thought—upon the water. She threw herself in the way of the squirrel, and, being a fascinating female, soon brought him to that state of mind in which he felt that he could not be happy without her, and of course that she could not be happy without him. Indeed, she avowed her admiration for him openly, but told him that his beauty had but one drawback—his tail. She could not endure a gentleman with a tail. This confession cast a gloom upon their intimacy; for his tail was his pride. But she was inexorable, and one day he appeared tailless. After this she had two children, born, like her others, tailless, but, unlike their elders, they showed an early inclination to sail chips in puddles; and when they were well grown she took them down to the lake-side with her husband. They immediately fashioned a piece of bark, boarded it, set up the palm-leaf sails, and flew across the water, untroubled by any of those dreadful symptoms from which she had suffered. The head of the family gazed with wonder, which he loudly expressed, that two of his children should perform such an unprecedented feat; but she sat in silence, musing doubtless upon this new triumph of the great principle of sexual selection, and thinking of herself as the mother of all them that go down to the sea in ships, and do their business upon the great waters. She had never mentioned her intimacy with the squirrel, and soon afterward picked a quarrel with him and cut his acquaintance as short as he had cut his tail.

Denuded of their hair, deprived of their hind thumb, thinking “therefore” and “I am ashamed,” provided with huts for the land, and the ability, in at least one family, to manage a bark on the water, the new species of gorilla now differed so widely from our own that their degeneration became very rapid, and it required but a short period, only a few hundred thousand years more, to make them sink into the depth of manhood.

As time went by, however, there were other applications of the great principle discovered by the Darwin, which have left some traces upon the development of the new species. How otherwise could there be such a multitude of men who have really the habits and traits of other animals? Asses, for instance: how many men are but asses, with the outside which they have inherited from their gorilla ancestors—a kind of mixture of monkey and donkey which, I need not tell you, is never found in our branch of the family. The very ears have not quite disappeared; for the Darwin himself says that some men can move their ears, and that length of the organ has only been diminished somewhat and turned down at the top. Does not man recognize this, and often call his fellow-man an ass? But who ever applied that term to a gorilla? And was one of our race, I ask, ever designated as Old Hoss? But every man knows that some of his fellow-men are geese, and vultures, and sharks, and foxes, and jackals? Are there not pigeons among them? Yes, Darwin, pigeons whom they pluck remorselessly. And is not the plucker frequently a jail-bird? Does not every countryman of the Darwin believe that there is a lion in his breast, the rousing of which would be followed by consequences so dreadful, that of late years he allows him to sleep under the most irritating provocations? And does not all this bear witness to various and numberless applications of the principle of sexual selection during past ages? Frankly, I cannot tell. It may be so, and it may not. The wisest gorilla knows so little that what we call knowledge is often merely the name we give to ignorance. And—

How much longer the speaker continued in this vein I cannot say. But as the audience began to stir uneasily, and many of those in the back rows went away, and even some of the more distinguished and self-possessed of the females in the front got up, turned their backs on the lecturer, and, followed by their attendant males, pushed their way out through the crowd, I was sure that the lecture was within a sentence or two of its end, and that if these persons had waited but a few minutes they might have avoided slighting the speaker and disturbing their fellow-hearers.

At this stage of the reading, I, too, left the place suddenly, the learned lecturer still speaking; but my motive was of a very different kind. During the lecture I had noticed a large and portly middle-aged gorilla look at me from time to time, and with increasing frequency. Each time, too, the glance was kindlier, and at last was accompanied by a nod, a beck, or a smile. What did this mean? I doubted; but for a moment. I considered the subject of the lecture, so stimulating to the female fancy, the experiences of the sex related in it, so fitted to awaken the instinct of imitation in the female breast; I thought of Darwin’s book, which I had read before I started for Africa, and I remembered the dreadful words: “et dignoscebat in turba, et advocat voce, gestuque,” just, too, as this portly old person was doing. It was too plain: this middle-aged dame, entering into the spirit of the lecture, had selected me. And now, being one of those that rose, she approached me as rapidly as possible. The sweat started from every pore, and, with double horror, I felt the hair on my body rise, reminding me, as it did so, of what likeness there was between me and this infatuated female. There was but one thing to do—to flee.

I got out of the throng as quickly as I could, and, glancing over my shoulder, I saw that she was following. I plunged into the forest, goaded by an indefinable terror. The thicket hampered me, but I pushed on; twigs clung to me, thorns seized me; I tore myself away; but, alas! I left my clothes. I was gradually stripped of my artificial covering, and revealed to my pursuer in that state of nature which bore yet further witness to our kindred. I turned my head again; she was gaining on me rapidly. The jungle that impeded and bewildered me, offered little or no restraint to her swift, practised steps. Observing this, I sought an open glade, which I saw ahead of me, and took to that, hoping—as I was now weighted only by my revolver, the leathern belt of which had resisted the laceration which had removed all my other covering—that on its even surface I might be at least the equal of my pursuer. In vain. Glancing backward as I ran, I saw her steadily approaching, and always nodding and beckoning with what seemed to me a loathsome leer. At last she came so near that I heard her panting breath. In a moment she might clasp me in her arms. I took the alternative, and turned to fight. My revolver was a slight weapon against such a creature, but still it was one of the largest bore; and, if it did not kill or disable my pursuer, it would at least enrage, and I might thus hope that instead of being embraced I would be disembowelled. As I faced her, she rose, and laying her hands upon her breast, bellowed out her admiration. I took steady aim across my left arm and fired. She sprang into the air, evidently hit, and as she came down I fired again, with like effect, and she fell to the ground.

I gazed a moment at my prostrate and dying admirer; and seeing that she was incapable of rising or doing me injury, I approached, with a certain feeling of pity and remorse, to look at her closely. And then I found that my terror, although justified, was entirely misplaced. I had mistaken the sex of my pursuer: my enamored female was a male—an enraged male, of course, and I was saved, not from marriage but from death. But no; faint, and dying fast, he turned and held out his hand to me. “Cousin, what made you run? Why did you hurt me so?” he said. I answered with a feeling of shame that I hope never to have again: “Because I thought you were a lady that wanted to marry me.” “Oh, no,” he said, with feeble and interrupted breath, “I only thought you looked something like a friend of ours who was here a few years ago; and I wanted to take you to a place where there are some cocoa-nut trees and a fresh spring, and we’d talk this matter over. And let me tell you something,” he said, drawing my ear down near his lips. “Don’t go on supposing that every female that may look at you pleasantly and seek your society has selected you. Remember me kindly to Du Chaillu. Adieu!”

He died; and I walked slowly on, musing upon my adventure, a more modest, if not a wiser man, and did not quicken my pace until I remembered that I was charged with Livingstone’s message to Murchison.