lake, while one tale would pass for an account of Jethro’s interview with Moses. The Africans have a liking for ontological speculation. Being ill one day, I asked one of our best students to speak to the people, when, to my utter disappointment, he dashed into an explanation of “three persons in one God”; but what surprised me most of all was that the people listened to him with the greatest attention. I felt that there was here the working, of a mode of thought that the Western mind has seldom sympathised with. The discussion seemed to have such a practical interest to them that I could not but think of the butchers of Alexandria, who, during the early Church controversy, when asked the price of mutton, would make some remark about Trinity in Unity. Little did the lecturer know what an amount of thought had been bestowed on this subject, and yet he showed he had been thinking himself, for every statement he made had evidently passed through the crucible of his own mind. Our older pupils formed the habit of asking me about everything in the Bible that they did not understand, and I have watched them with breathless interest as they read passages bearing on “Free-Will”. But they were never “pulled up” by this subject, although I fancied that one boy came very near the difficulty. They would doubtless hold that God could foresee, much as a wise man can. It was a subject where to them “ignorance was bliss,” and I could not be so cruel as to suggest the difficulties that encompass this antinomy (as Kant calls it). Still, it might not have been such a puzzle to these young lads, as they had not lived in a country where will is evoked in a struggle with the elements. Again, where the vast majority are entirely at the disposal of guardians or slave-masters, a species of resigned fatalism is apt to be developed. Once when translating the sermon on the mount, “Be not anxious for to-morrow; sufficient for the day is the evil thereof,” I was admonished, “Don’t tell them that; their sin lies the opposite way. They never think of to-morrow at all!” Such is the fact, these creatures of God have little or no anxiety. Like the bird of the air and the beast of the forest, they “believe and live”. END OF VOL. I. APPENDIX. NATIVE TALES LITERALLY TRANSLATED. APPENDIX. 1. PEOPLE. People came from _kapilimtiya_ [an unsteady (soft) stone][16]. There came forth two, a man and a woman, and they married and had children. Then there was seen another man who was sick, being a leper, who had come from _kapilimtiya_. The sick man sent the woman to draw water, then he opened a bag and took out maize and millet. On this earth there was no grass,[17] and he said, “You two may sleep in a cave”. The sick man died, and the other man put an offering on the ground[18] saying, “You have left us here, now give us grass”. So grass grew and trees; and his children grew and had children; hence the tribe of the Yao. 2. THE SUN.