Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/339

 penetrate their cars with porcupine quills or sticks. They neither sell nor buy each other, though they acquire children of both sexes from other tribes, and adopt them into their own, or dispose of them if not suitable. Their avails of work are commonly divided; so the Bagers may be said to resemble the Mormons in polygamy, the Fourierites in community, but to exceed both in honesty."

As a contrast to our gloomy picture of the wrongs of Africa, we present a glimpse of its gorgeous natural scenery. It will be a relief to turn away for a moment from the contemplation of violence and crime, of wretchedness and despair — the foul exhalations of the reeking slave-deck, the charnel house of corruption, disease, and death.

"As the traveler along the coast turns the prow of his canoe through the surf, and crosses the angry bar that guards the mouth of an African river, he suddenly finds himself moving calmly onward between sedgy shores, buried in mangroves. Presently the scene expands in the unruffled mirror of a deep majestic stream. Its lofty banks are covered by innumerable varieties of the tallest forest trees, from whose summits a trailing net-work of vines and flowers floats down and sweeps the passing current. A stranger who beholds this scenery for the first time is struck by the immense size, the prolific abundance, and gorgeous verdure of every thing. Leaves large enough for garments lie piled and motionless in the lazy air. The bamboo and cane shake their slender spears and pennant leaves as the stream ripples among their roots. Beneath the massive trunks of forest trees the country opens; and, in vistas through the wood, the traveler sees innumerable fields lying fallow in grass, or waving with harvests of rice and cassava, broken by golden clusters of Indian corn. Anon, groups of oranges, lemons, coffee-trees, plantains, and bananas are crossed by the tall stems of cocoas, and arched by the broad and drooping coronals of royal palm. Beyond this, capping the summit of a hill, may be seen the conical huts of natives, bordered by fresh pastures dotted with flocks of sheep and goats, or covered with numbers of the sleekest cattle. As you leave the coast, and shoot round the river-curves of this fragrant wilderness, teeming with flowers, vocal with birds, and gay with their radiant plumage, you plunge into the interior, where the rising country slowly expands into hills and mountains.

"The forest is varied. Sometimes it is a matted pile of tree, vine and bramble, obscuring every thing, and impervious save with knife and hatchet. At others it is as a Gothic temple. The sward spreads openly for miles on every side, while, from its even surface, the trunks of straight and massive trees rise to a prodigious height, clear from every obstruction, till their gigantic limbs, like the capitals of columns, mingle their foliage in a roof of perpetual verdure.

"At length the hills are reached, and the lowland heat is tempered by mountain freshness. The scene that may be beheld from almost any elevation is always beautiful, and sometimes grand. Forest, of course, prevails; yet with a glass, and often by the unaided eye, gentle hills, swelling from the wooded landscape, may be seen covered with native huts, whose neighborhood is