Women are thus bought and sold. A man’s wealth is reckoned by the number of his wives. On one occasion in a native town a conversation with the chief led me to preach on the future life; and I preached both heaven and hell. The chief evidently inferred that he was bound for the latter place. He asked me what I thought about it. I told him candidly that I thought so too. For a moment he seemed troubled, and then his countenance brightened with relief, and he exclaimed: “I know what I’ll do. I’ll send my head-wife in my place.” Belief in witchcraft is the extreme expression of mutual distrust. It is supposed that as many Africans are put to death for witchcraft as those who die in war. The African seems not to believe that there is any such thing as a natural death. Even when a man is killed in war some one is usually charged with having bewitched him; for it will be said that he wore a fetish for safety, but that a witch had broken the spell of the fetish. A witch’s spirit is “loose from her body.” In the night she leaves her body and goes off to foregather with other witches with whom she joins in wild and unspeakably wicked revels, during which they feast upon the “hearts” of people. The people whose hearts have thus been eaten sicken soon afterwards and die. A witch is always careful to return to her body before daylight. If the vacant body be found during her absence it would be wise to destroy it immediately. When a number of deaths occur in close succession a council is held in the presence of the witch-doctor. When he announces witchcraft as the cause a panic ensues in which the people become fairly dehumanized with fear and a thirst for vengeance. Each one suspects everybody else. The witch-doctor sometimes names the guilty persons. And woe to any enemies that he may have in that town! Usually, however, they resort to the ordeal to find the guilty ones. The spectacle of such a panic is very revolting. The horrors of war, even at the worst, are never comparable to the horrors of witchcraft. It is the constant fear of the African, and his most powerful fetishes are those which protect him against it. Except in the vicinity of the foreign governments witches are put to death and always by cruel means, wives charged with witchcraft being buried alive with the dead body of the husband. In one town that I know ten women, wives of one man, were thus buried with him; in another town, twenty women. Their legs were broken before they were thrown into the grave.