Notwithstanding the disturbed state of the times, the stranger is well received, and is questioned with avidity. He is gratified to find that his country is a subject of interest to the English as well as to the Portuguese. They seem, indeed, to be fully aware that Africa is the most favored portion of the globe. They are never tired of asking about its perpetual summer, its marvellous fertility, its inexhaustible mines. Even the common soldiers in Henry's army "speak of Africa and golden joys." He finds that some of the learned maintain that continent to have been the first home of man, and believe that the terrestrial Paradise lies somewhere hidden among its mountains. When he becomes a little more familiar with his hosts, however, he finds that they entertain some notions not altogether so flattering. They are curious about a certain people of Africa who live in the caves of the earth, whose meat is the flesh of serpents, and who have no proper human speech, but only a grinning and chattering; they ask him whether his travels in his own country have extended as far as the land of the Blemmyes, a people without heads, who have their eyes and mouth set in their breasts. He answers, a little stiffly, that he has no knowledge of any such people. When they go on to inquire whether he ever ventured into the region inhabited by the Anthropophagi, explaining at the same time what peculiarities are intimated by that name, his indignation almost gets the better of him, and he denies, with some vehemence, that such wretches hold any portion of his native soil. His English friends assure him that it is nevertheless very certain that such a people live in the neighborhood of the Mountains of the Moon. When he finds that he cannot otherwise persuade them out of this injurious opinion, he ventures, though with as much delicacy as possible, to tell them, that, while on the mainland of Europe, he heard stories equally wonderful and equally absurd of their own island. In especial, he heard a Frenchman assert that the eating of human flesh was practised in some part of the dominions of the English king. He assures his English friends that he refused to credit this story, as well as some other particulars in regard to their island, which seemed to him too monstrous for belief, though they were given to him on the authority of a Greek traveller of high reputation, who had not long before visited England in company with the Emperor of the East, and who had enjoyed extraordinary opportunities for studying the manners of the most polite society of the kingdom. The Mandingo is here interrupted by his English hosts, who make haste to assure him that the Greeks are everywhere known to be great liars; that the same may be said of Frenchmen; and that, indeed, there is no nation of Europe, except their own, whose word is at all to be relied upon. The Mandingo refrains from passing so severe a judgment on the travellers