70 AFRICAN WANDERINGS.

number of men will also be in some similar manner made appear much less than the real number, and so diminish the head tax, i» also not to be doubted. And who, save a Turk, could blame the people for doing so, as it is only what self-interest teaches ?

The lot of the oppressed and enslaved is pitiable enough in its best view ; but doubly enraged must every right-minded man be when he sees how inhumanly even Europeans allow themselves to act towards the unfortunates who have the ill fate of being their slaves. Thus the tender-hearted apothecary Dumont blushes not constantly to vent his uncalled-for passion in the most savage manner by kurbasch, fist, or foot on his little slave Amber, though the poor lad does more than all his other servants— but then the slave cannot defend himself! Often have we before now left this brute's presence not to be spectators of his savage cruelties, but he seems determined to persist in these in spite of all our remonstrances. I have, however, at last informed him that I will call him to an account with my sabre if he does not desist, and also have threatened him that we will take Amber away from him, give him letters of manumission, and employ him as our servant, as he (Dumont) being an European and Frenchman has no right to possess a slave and this we have already done in the cases of some ill-used slaves of Europeans in Chartum, and in these acts the Pascha ever supported us. Unfortunately, he is not the only Frank here who acts thus tyrannically ; nor can I refrain from mentioning by name another, the Frenchman Vigoureux, an old corporal of Napoleon's, at present living at Kordofan, who is also guilty of even worse cruelties. That his manner and habits have not lost their old corporal's tinge is no fair charge against him, but it is a nameless disgrace to him that his newly-imported Parisian wife should be allowed to exercise on her female slaves the cruelties of all sorts she too often is guilty of. While in Chartum, my brother, one day at noon, during its fearful heat, saw this man's small ten-year old female slave Nimra bound perfectly naked to a post, so that her body, all marked with bloody wheals and clotted, drying, and bleeding cuts, was exposed to the sun's glowing rays, without her having the power of moving it. On his demanding the cause, madame and monsieur smilingly replied, that the little girl had not done something exactly as this Xantippe had ordered, and that