Ground glass--glass powdered so fine that it is like precipitated chalk to the touch--is a bad poison, because when it comes in contact with delicate membranes right down inside a man, it lacerates them and he dies, as the bad men of the coast know, and have known for hundreds of years. In the course of time Lataki came before a judge who sat in a big thatched barn of a courthouse, and Lataki brought three cousins, a brother, and a disinterested friend, to swear that Sanders had put the glass in his own "chop" with malice aforethought. In spite of the unanimity of the evidence--the witnesses had no less than four rehearsals in a little hut the night before the trial--the prisoner was sentenced to fifteen years' penal servitude. Here the matter would have ended, but for the Lulungo people, who live far away in the north, and who chose to regard the imprisonment of their man as a _casus belli_. They were a suspicious people, a sullen, loveless, cruel people, and they were geographically favoured, for they lived on the edge of a territory which is indisputably French, and, moreover, unreachable. Sanders sent flying messages to all the white people who lived within striking distance of the Lulungo. There were six in all, made up of two missions, Jesuit and Baptist. They were most unsatisfactory people, as the following letters show: The first from the Protestant: "Losebi Mission. "Dear Mr. Commissioner,--My wife and I are very grateful to you for your warning, but God has called us to this place, and here we must stay, going about our Master's business, until He, in His wisdom, ordains that we shall leave the scene of our labours." Father Holling wrote: "Ebendo River. "Dear Sanders,--I think you are wrong about the Lulungo people, several of whom I have seen recently. They are mighty civil, which is the only bad sign I have detected. I shall stay because I think I can fight off any attack they make. I have four Martini-Metford rifles, and three thousand rounds of ammunition, and this house, as you know, is built of stone. I hope you are wrong, but----"