Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/354

346 the purpose it is intended to serve. If the victim is to be got rid of, he dies; if not, then the dose is such as to give him a severe shaking and a big fright. Another method is plunging the hands into boiling fat. If the hands are scalded, the person is guilty; if not, he is innocent. How it is they manage this trick—for trick it is—I do not know, unless it is that they are acquainted with certain of the effervescing substances by which they can cause molten fat to bubble as if boiling when at a comparatively low temperature. But an African doctor is not easily taken aback under any circumstances. When he orders a hunter to char the eye of his first elephant to cinders, and broil the point of his trunk as a dainty morsel, after which he will have full power over the life of any pachyderm, and he, on the following day, either loses his quarry or is tossed into the branches of an overhanging tree, the man of science calmly tells him that a particle of the eye was not reduced to ashes, or that the morsel cooked was not entirely eaten by him, and that he has only his own carelessness to thank for his misadventure.

Nor is he without a say regarding smaller game. If young men go hunting privately as distinguished from an organised hunt by the chief, and eat any portion of the product of the chase before laying it down at the feet of the elders who remain at home, they will either die or be turned into jackals or other beasts of prey. This is an effectual check on the dishonesty of the savage gamekeeper who might feel tempted to purloin a hare or pheasant- cock.

There is very frequently a kind of honourable rivalry between the doctor and the missionary. The former represents ancient conservatism; the latter, innovation, revolution, and complete change of all established social customs. When the preacher, Bible in hand, arrives at a chief's village, the meeting-place is generally the shaded side of the cattle-kraal or fold on the greensward. Inside the fold a small fire is kindled while the people assemble. At