We still had many instances around us of a rough and ready form of executing justice which we should have liked to see entirely abolished. One evening a native, through a piece of very clever, but at the same time, very mean treachery, stole two valuable rings from an artisan; the latter felt that if he informed the Superintendent he would certainly lose his rings, and taking his gun on his shoulder, he marched straight to the village, where the thief lived, and secured the man’s wife and daughter and began, with great show of severity, to “beat and confine in slave sticks”. The headman of that village, who was then returning from Ndilande, met “all his people calling out ‘murder’!” So much were the villagers terrified that they were afraid to sleep in their village, and the headman came in to me with a sad tale. The artisan, however, recovered the rings, whereas if he had tried to reason calmly, he would certainly have exposed himself to the ridicule of the natives, who are too ready to assume that clemency springs from want of power. Nor, indeed, does the British Government itself resort to reasoning as the method, of dealing with criminals. The natives sometimes behaved in a very peculiar manner on the exercise of such discipline (which is, indeed, the only kind of justice they are familiar with). A strange case was brought under my notice in the following way:—On going to a village one Saturday morning, I was greatly astonished to find all the villagers running away on my approach. Unless my pupils had shouted out who I was, I should not have found any one to speak to. But the people all hastened back, and explained why they had been afraid at the appearance of a white man. A person from their neighbourhood had stolen, and an artisan, after failing to get satisfaction, had gone over and set fire to the village where the thief lived and shot down the fowls. Immediately after this exploit the artisan found the villagers coming in with presents to him, admitting that they had done wrong in stealing, and professing their willingness to pay damages! Native character is sometimes an enigma. On one occasion a chief stayed for a few days at Blantyre. Several English visitors courted his friendship very much, and often went a long distance out of their way in order to shake hands with him when he was drunk; the sable chieftain laughed at them and called them hard names! A Portuguese gentleman who was present at the same time, gave the chief no such honour, and explained that, though acquainted with natives all his days, he had never shaken hands with one in his life; yet he gained the chieftain’s sincere respect. Traits of character like this, force themselves at once upon the attention of persons that settle among the negroes, and though even a little experience shows that the native can value goodness, men that have no love for him, are apt to treat him in a shameful way.