Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/90

 74 Collectanea.

with drugs and poisons unknown to us. The following story, told by Canon Dale in African Tidi?igs for 1901, p. 41, seems to point to this conclusion. The Canon is writing of events during his residence at Mkuzi, a village about seven miles from Magila, in German East Africa, and perhaps 30 miles from the seaport of Tanga : " A man wished to get rid of his enemy, so he went to a native doctor and asked for some medicine of sufficient power to kill a man. The doctor gave it to him. The man distrusted the doctor and the efficacy of his drug, so he thought he would try it on the doctor himself first. Accordingly he went to the doctor's shamba and hid the medicine in a hole under a papaw tree. Soon after, a slave-girl belonging to the doctor came along, reached the spot where the medicine was concealed, and fell down dead then and there. But some one had seen the man conceal the drug, and accused him to the doctor, and the doctor carried him before the native judge. The native judge refused to give any damages. He said, ' No, my friend ! if you deal in such medicines you deserve all and more than you have got. I abso- lutely refuse to consider your case.' Then the whole district in the person of the elders went to this doctor and told him, ' If ever we hear of a similar case we will either kill you or drive you out of the country.' Now the significant point in the whole case is that of the accused, accuser, judge, and people, not a single person had the slightest doubt that the medicine really did kill the slave-girl. The only sceptic in the district was myself, and I am still open to conviction one way or the other."

R. Webb. 4, Osborne Terrace, Virginia Road, Leeds.