The savage woman also is very often kind and good. It is notorious that the explorers of savage countries have often escaped serious perils, thanks to the kindness of the native women. Australasian women have often revealed to European travellers the plots laid against them by the men of their tribe: they have even risked their own lives for that purpose.[33] Stanley, at the island of Bambyrch, on the Nyanza, was roughly greeted by the natives, who were desirous of exterminating his expedition; but a woman came to warn him and to advise him to perform a certain ceremony with the King Shekka by which he would acquire his friendship. In Senegambia an old woman, meeting Mungo Park, who was half dead of starvation and had just been despoiled by a negro king, gave him food, and went away without waiting to be thanked. Another time the same traveller, being left with nothing but his saddle, was hospitably entertained by some women, whom he heard chant these words as he fell asleep: “The winds roared and the rain beat, the poor white man came and sat down under our tree, he had no mother to give him milk, no wife to grind him corn. Let us take pity on the white man, he has no mother, etc., etc.”[34] Michelet says that woman was the first physician; and certainly she fulfils the office of infirmarian among many savage peoples, the Esquimaux, the Mincopies, etc. etc. In war the Samoan woman often interferes to make peace between the belligerents. Among the Khonds, also, when two tribes quarrel, the women sometimes make peace, calling in the intervention of a third tribe. Quite recently, among the Montenegrins and Albanians, fierce strife broke out between different families, but in these fights, if a man took refuge with a woman and she covered him with her apron, he was safe. Among the Bedouin Arabs a woman can save the life of the condemned man who implores her protection. So it also was among the Roman Vestals, when in the streets they accidentally met a man condemned to death; it was required, however, that the meeting should be evidently a chance one, for it was feared that the privilege might be carried too far. Among civilised nations this sentiment of pity becomes naturally more developed. Christianity owed a great deal of its success among women to the fact, that it knew how to make use of their pity, by organising those associations of women which are its greatest ornament. From the earliest years after the death of Jesus, in the cenobitic form of society lived by the disciples of the Messiah, they made use of the charitable sentiment of childless widows and created the order of Deaconesses, which was devoted to the care of the poor and the sick.[35] Legouvé says: “Women offered their services to Christianity like a volunteer battalion consecrated to charitable work. In the Apostles’ time their mission was one of sympathy and watchfulness, a mother’s vocation; in the time of the