A lot of yelping boys came into the enclosure, and crowded about the butchers aiding the goat in his attempts to get away, by attempting to catch him, and of course running in the way of those who might have been able to do it. A number of women also thronged in as the stir became faster, and who stood around me as a kind of body-guard, for the leaping “diabolus” of a goat sometimes threatened even to make our heads a stepping-stone to fly over the high enclosure. A long lasso at length being thrown ignobly at his feet, the next move he made ensnared him by the leg, and the triumph of his life-hunters was complete. The rope being run around the trunk of the mimosa, the unwilling goat was dragged, like a victim of Spanish civil war, backwards to his doom, and a prayer of peace being muttered by the clerk, Walderheros, the high priest, the misselannee, cut the throat of their prey, the invocation of the Trinity, like the Islam “ul Allah,” sanctifying the bloody business of depriving an animal of life. It is singular to observe the pertinacity of custom, and how characteristic of descent particular habits and ceremonies become long after the separation of different nations from their original root. The Arabs, the Amhara, or the Abyssinians, and the Jews, all precede the slaughter of animals for food with some short prayer, which, differing in form, is still the same custom, and which, I think, originated at a period antecedent to their dispersion as different nations into the several countries they now occupy. It has also continued among them, even changed as these nations are in religion and social character, the Hebrew trader, the Arab nomade shepherd, and the Abyssinian agriculturist. Jew, Mahomedan, and Christian, still retain this evidence of a common origin, but which marks an ethnological era posterior, I believe, by many centuries to the more general custom of circumcision common to all these people, and to many other African nations.[10]