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 242 DICK SANDS, THE BOY CAPTAIN. which» unregenerated by their own labour^ would otherwiae diminish and ultimately disappear. As in thc time of Buonaparte, thèse slaves often become soldîers ; on the Upper Niger, for instance, they stîU fonn half the army of certain chieftains, under circumstances in which their lot is hardly, if at ail, inferior to that of free men. Elscwhere, where the slave is not a soldier, hc counts mercly as current coin ; and in Bornu and even in Egypt, we are told by William Lejean, an eye-witnes% that officcrs and other functionaries hâve received their pay in this form. Such, then, appears to be the présent actual condition of the slave-trade ; and it is stern justice that compels thc additional statement that there are représentatives of cer- tain grcat Europcan powers who still favour the unholy traffic with an indulgent connivance, and whilst cruisers arc watching thc coasts of the Atlantic and of the Indian Occan, kidnapping goes on regularly in the interior, caravans pass along under the very eyes of certain officiais, and massacres are perpctrated in which frequently ten ncgrocs arc sacrificed in thc capture of a single slave. It was the knowlcdge, more or Icss complète, of ail this, that wrung from Dick Sands his bitter and heart-rending cry : — " Ve are in Africa ! in the very haunt of slave-drivers ! " Too truc it was that he found himself and his com- panions in a land fraught with such frightful pcril. He could only tremble when he wondered on what part of the fatal continent the "Pilgrim" had strandcd. Evidently it was at some point of the west coast, and he had cvery rcason to fear that it was on the shores of Angola, the rendczvous for ail the caravans that joumey in that portion of Africa. His conjecture was correct; he really was in thc very country that a few years later and with gigantic effort was to be traverscd by Cameron in the south and Stanley in the north. Of the vast territory, with its threc provinces, Congo, Angola, and Benguela, little was then known exccpt the coast It extends from the Zaire on the north