One day I heard a sudden outcry of great alarm from a village at the foot of our hill. Several men of that village were at our station at the time, and with a shout they started for home. I quickly followed them and saw as I entered the village that a tragedy had occurred. I afterwards learned that four of their prominent men had been shot. They were hunting in the forest and not suspecting danger, when another party, who were really friendly, mistook them for enemies in the dark forest, and shot all four. This is a kind of mistake that occurs frequently. The native would rather kill ten friends than let one enemy escape; so they often kill first and investigate afterwards. The village was very small and the loss of four stalwart men left them insufficiently protected against their enemies. This day the four bodies had been found in the forest and the news had just reached the village. Instantly, all the wives of those men stripped off their scant clothing of leaves, smeared their bodies with clay and running into the garden of bananas threw themselves on the ground tearing their hair and screaming, while the other women of the village gathered around and tried to comfort them. There was more than one reason for this demonstration. In part it was probably genuine grief; but there was also a strong element of fear, the fear of every wife whose husband dies from any cause whatsoever, that she will be charged with having bewitched him and suffer the penalty of death, perhaps by being buried alive with the dead body of her husband. For in this instance of the four men, it would be said, that they wore upon their necks certain fetishes that would have made them invisible to any one attempting to do them harm, and that evidently the spell of witchcraft had broken the power of the fetish. The fact that a man’s wife, or wives, are the first to be charged with his death, implying that they would be more likely than others to desire it, throws a lurid light upon their social relations and incidentally upon polygamy. The African wife everywhere is an artist in the use of poison. In that entire year at Efulen I do not remember that there was one natural death, though we never ceased to hear their mourning for the dead. In those tribes where no degree of civilization is yet established it is estimated that nineteen out of twenty Africans die by violence. And when one comes to know the people individually and by name, instead of by impersonal figures, one realizes something of the enormity of wrong and suffering covered by this record.