The discovery of witchcraft was made in a peculiar way. A certain man who was sick and lying awake at night with pain, thought one night that he heard a sound in the street. He crawled close to the wall and peering through a crack he beheld in the street the phantom form of a woman carrying the form of a child. She laid the child down in the street. Then she drew the form of a knife with the evident intention of cutting the child to pieces and eating it. But the knife was powerless to cut because of the bodily eyes of the man who was a spectator. Again and again the woman tried to dissect the child and still the knife refused to cut. At length it occurred to her that she was probably being watched. Then, taking the child up quickly, she returned it to the house whence she had stolen it, restored it to its body, and fled, without being recognized by the man who had seen her. In the morning he reported to the town all he had seen. The wildest excitement ensued. The mothers of the town were in terror, not knowing who the witch was that was eating their children. But one of the women was taken suddenly ill and they became suspicious, though they said nothing. She grew rapidly worse until she was seized with a convulsion and foam appeared at her mouth, a certain sign of witchcraft and that her own witch inside had rebelled and was eating her. Then they all reviled and cursed her, gave her no food, threw cold water on her, mocked her agony, and exulted in her pain until she died. A deep, resonant, hungry roar of a leopard arrests the attention of the company around the camp-fire. It is at a pretty safe distance, however, and the white man having given orders to keep the fire burning retires to his hammock a little apart, but takes his rifle with him. The effect of these last stories is sobering and saddening, especially to a mind not yet accustomed to such tales. A shadow lies across the white man’s heart. And that same shadow lies across every charm in Africa and mars every beauty—the reflection of the cruel ignorance and awful sufferings of its people. The observer who does not see the shadow must never have entered into the mind-life and the heart-life of the people. The vast forest darkness, and the weird night-sounds that befit the darkness, deepen the impression of the camp-fire stories. That piercing cry of the lemur, how it suggests the terror of the wretched man devoured by driver ants! And that other mournful note is surely the remorse of spirits in the other world for cruel deeds committed here. There is now something awful in the darkness. One feels with the _Ancient Mariner_— “Like one that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows a fearful fiend Doth close behind him tread.”