Despite the veneer of civilization, I fear that this amiable and graceful people—excepting only the few Christians—are as superstitious as ever. Nature is still inhabited by myriad spirits to whose activity natural phenomena are due. They still speak of the great spirit who causes the flow and ebb of the tide by dropping an enormous stone into the sea and again removing it. Trial by ordeal is common even among the most intelligent. And not a death occurs among them that is not attributed to witchcraft. A man dying in the hospital at Gaboon turns his solemn, beautiful eyes towards one who sits beside him, and tells in confidence what has brought about his death. It is strange how approaching death, as if to testify to man’s divine origin in the hour of his most appalling defeat, dignifies the features and countenance of the lowest with a mysterious dignity that transcends all differences of colour, transforms even natural ugliness, and brings all men to one level. The greatest is no more than human; the lowest is no less. This dying man tells how that some weeks past, having gone on a journey to a certain town forty miles north, and during the night having wondered what his friends at home might be doing, he thought he would visit Gaboon, leaving his body while his spirit alone travelled through the air. But on the way he met a company of spirits making a similar journey, one of whom was an enemy; who, recognizing him, gave him a fatal thrust in the side. He quickly returned to his body; but in the morning he felt the weakness resulting from the fatal stroke, and from that day had grown weaker and weaker until death was upon him. I was present at the trial of a slave, in a leading Mpongwe town, who was accused of causing the death of one of the relations of the chief, a man who had been ill for a long time with tuberculosis. I had been calling on the sick man regularly. One day, going again to the town, I saw a crowd of people gathered in the street who were very much excited. The man had just died, and as usual the panic-stricken people were determined to blame somebody. The chief who was trying the case was a well-educated man who had been closely associated with white people all his life and was prominent in trade. Arbitrary suspicion had about settled upon this slave—for slaves are always the first to be suspected—when a boy came forward and said that on the preceding night he had discovered the slave standing behind the sick man’s house and that he had watched him while he opened a bundle of leaves which he had in his hand and in which was a piece of human flesh like a fish in size and form. No more evidence was necessary. No one asked the boy how he knew that it was not a fish which he had seen; nor how he knew that it was human.