The young women have none of the sylphlike appearance of the Mandingoes or Soosoos. They work hard and use palm-oil plentifully both internally and externally, so that their relaxed flesh is bloated like blubber. Both sexes shave their heads, and adorn their noses and lower lips with rings, while they penetrate their ears with porcupine quills or sticks. _They neither sell nor buy each other_, though they acquire children of both sexes from other tribes, and adopt them into their own, or dispose of them if not suitable. Their avails of work are commonly divided; so the Bagers may be said to resemble the Mormons in polygamy, the Fourierites in community, but to exceed both in honesty! I am sorry that their nobler characteristics have so few imitators among the other tribes of Africa. CHAPTER XV. When the rains began to slacken, a petty caravan now and then straggled towards the coast; but, as I was only a new comer in the region, and not possessed of abundant means, I enjoyed a slender share of the trade. Still I consoled myself with the hope of better luck in the dry season. In the mean time, however, I not only heard of Joseph's safe arrival at Matanzas, but received a clerk whom he dispatched to dwell in Kambia while I visited the interior. Moreover, I built a boat, and sent her to Sierra Leone with a cargo of palm-oil, to be exchanged for British goods; and, finally, during my perfect leisure, I went to work with diligence _to study_ the trade in which fortune seemed to have cast my lot. It would be a task of many pages if I attempted to give a full account of the origin and causes of _slavery in Africa_. As a national institution, it seems to have existed always. Africans have been bondsmen every where: and the oldest monuments bear their images linked with menial toils and absolute servitude. Still, I have no hesitation in saying, that three fourths of the slaves _sent abroad_ from Africa are the fruit of native wars, fomented by the avarice and temptation of our own race. I cannot exculpate any commercial nation from this sweeping censure. We stimulate the negro's passions by the introduction of wants and fancies never dreamed of by the simple native, while slavery was an institution of domestic need and comfort alone. But what was once a luxury has now ripened into an absolute necessity; so that MAN, _in truth, has become the coin of Africa, and the "legal tender" of a brutal trade_.