A SLAVE-RAIDING INCIDENT 117 caught, with their party of slaves, by a native Sheikh of some importance, on the Abyssinian frontier. Five of them were promptly led up a precipitous rock, and received a slight push ; the rest concerned the hytenas and vultures. The "bag" reached the ears of the Government, but not so the punishment, and the Sheikh was called on to send the offenders for trial. The poor fellow was at his wits' end to comply, but with grim irony exhibited the resource of the savage. In the old days, there being seven men to be accounted for, seven men, of course, would have had to be found, and that they did not happen to be the real delinquents would have mattered as little in Africa as in China. So the Sheikh " bagged " five poor, innocent traders* and sent them up, with the two slavers surviving, to the Government centre. The latter protested their innocence as energetically as the five victims, and the Sheikh so impressed the slaves with the statement that, if they told the truth, horrors unimaginable awaited them in this life and hereafter, that they implicitly obeyed his commands. So it seemed likely that a grave miscarriage of justice would take place ; but there remained a small boy, and that boy, as usual, had an appetite, and that appetite caused a craving for sugar, the temptation of which induced him to talk, and the whole story came out. The slaves were reassured, confirmed the facts, and all came right in the end, the merchants being released, and the slavers saving their skins by being condemned to seven years'