"The negroes were gifted with inexorable logic. According to them, since we wished to carry off our prisoners into bondage, we ought to take the same precautions with them that they had with their slaves. As their own wrists had been hung with chains, and their necks forced under the yoke, we ought to put the same measures in force, and to this end they very kindly handed over to us the necessary articles. "It would have been positively unfair to deprive these good folk of their little enjoyment, and, as regards the escort, seeing that they had had every sort of reason to believe that they were doomed to be massacred, they might very well think themselves lucky in getting off with a simple application of the _lex talionis_. Consequently, we did not see any use in protesting against this decidedly African idea, and we let our new friends fetter their prisoners to their heart's content. "At such moments as these, my dear fellow, men who have any pretensions to common sense will go with the stream, yield to circumstances, and give up their sentimental tendencies. And, moreover, I will not attempt to conceal from you that I felt a thrill of enjoyment at the prospect of seeing those worthy traders undergoing for several hours the identical treatment which for so many years they had been inflicting upon the tribes in these regions. They made the most ludicrous efforts to get their heads out of the yokes and to free their shoulders from the heavy loads with which their former slaves were weighing them down. "I rejoiced also, you may be sure, over the moral torture they were undergoing. Please understand that I do not by this mean that they had any sense of humiliation—they were incapable of any such feeling; I allude to the injury done to their commercial interests. Just think for a moment—after having undertaken, and almost accomplished, so hazardous a journey, after having gone through such toilsome exertions to provide slaves for the markets of southern Africa—after all this, to see the fruits of their labour gone at one fell swoop! To have to surrender a certain profit, as they thought, and be at all the expense of their first purchase, besides the cost of provisions, cords, chains and yokes! The chains and the yokes, it is true, had been generously restored, and they could take them with them on their necks, but the bags of rice and durra, of which they had provided a supply sufficient to meet their wants across the deserts of Bahiouda and Nubia, became the property of the negroes. These inconsiderate people were even indiscreet enough to lay violent hands on the private supplies of the chief and his escort, dried meat, dates, coffee, tobacco, which up to now they had been compelled to carry on their heads without the power of touching them.