when the brother heard the hyenas singing "Let us eat her," etc., he pulled the string-Kwé! and his sister awoke, and heard them. And in the morning he said, "You have heard them, my sister." And he said, "Brother-in-law, lend me an adze (nsompo) that I may cut a great piece of wood to mend the grain-mortar." And he finished making it, and he put his sister's nsengwas2 into the log, and fastened them tightly, and put his sister into the baskets, and said: Chínguli chánga, nde, nde, nde. (And the basket flew away with them, and) they fell on a tree. And the hyenas followed after them, and he said (as before), "My chínguli," etc. And they fell down on his mother's mtondo,* and he said again "Chinguli chânga, nde, nde, nde, etc. 1 In the original chinguli, augmentative of nguli, which, according to Rev. D. C. Scott's Mang'anja Dictionary, means (1) "a whipping-top," made and played with in much the same way as ours (2) "a patch of wood to mend the mtondo grain-mortar," I had the first meaning given meI forget how, exactly, and long vainly tried to make sense of the passage. As a round hole would have to be cut in the log, to make it fit the top of the worn-out grain-mortar, this would serve as a convenient pretext for hollowing a log to hold his sister. 2 Nsengwa is a small flat basket. Two fastened together at one point of their edges, make a close receptacle-the plural seems to show that this kind is meant. 3 The meaning of this is : "My chinguli-nde, nde, nde," [meaningless syllables] "Accompany her (to the place) Where my mother is." This and the previous song are always sung by the narrator, and usually taken up by the listeners. I cannot help wondering whether the meaningless "Ingle-go-jang, my joy, my joy" of "Uncle Remus," on p. 124 of Routledge's edition, can possibly be a distorted version of this. It is true that it occurs in a totally different story-that of "Brer Bar" and "Brer Bull-frog "—but the sense of the words once forgotten, they might easily be displaced. Most of the relics of African languages preserved in America,however, seem to point to the West Coast. The only one I can call to mind just now is the word goober, for ground nut ("Uncle Remus," p. 115), which is the Fiote (Lower Congo) nguba: in Mang'anja it is ntedza. The large mortar, cut out of a solid log, used for pounding grain. Katembo, though a very intelligent little fellow, seems to have missed some of the connecting links in this story, which will, however, become clearer by a comparison with Mr. Macdonald's version, here following. The language of the latter differs, as well as the details. This may be accounted for, partly by a divergent system of orthography, partly by dialectical difference— the Mang'anja of the River people being considered purer than that spoken at Blantyre. Some of the phrases, too, almost strike one as purposely simplified for the white man's benefit-thus ntanga la nkuku (by the by, it should be ya not la), "the basket of the fowls," instead of chipwere, the regular word for "coop," used by Katembo. There was once a woman, and she had a daughter, and she said, "My child must not marry (any) but a good man." And there came a man and she refused him. Afterwards, there came another, and he said, "We have heard that this child of yours refuses men." Her mother said, "Wait, I will tell her herself," and she went and told her, and (the girl) said, "I do not want him." And after that a hyena was changed, so as to be a man, and (came and) said, "I want to marry." And the mother said, "I do not know"-it may be she will consent." And she told her, and the girl said, "Yes, I am willing to take that man." And he said, "Let us go to my home, and see my mother." And they went away together (lit. they followed one another). And the woman had 5 An onomatopeic word expressing a sudden fall, as of a bird when shot. 6 In the original Kaya, mwini ache-literally "I do not know-(she is) the owner"-i.e., "I have nothing to do with it-she will arrange the matter for herself." Kaya is more nearly equivalent to the Spanish "Quien sabe?” than to a simple "I do not know," sometimes it has the force of "perhaps." a brother, and she said to him, "I beg of you, my brother, that you will not follow me-you have sore eyes." They arrived at the village, and the brother slept in the hen-coop. In the middle of the night, the husband awoke and said, "I am going to eat my wives." And her brother heard him. And in the morning, when it was light, he said, "My sister, did you hear that your husband is going to eat you (as) meat?" And the woman said, "No, I did not hear him." And he said, "Just wait a little (?); to-day I am going to look for a piece of string, and I shall tie it to your little finger." And he tied it to his sister's little finger, and he said, "If I hear (him saying) that he will eat you, I will pull the string, and you will wake and hear the words your husband says." And when he pulled the string, afterwards the woman said, "Yes, my brother, it is not a lie. To-day I have heard him, but what shall we do?" And the man (i.e., her brother) said, “I know-I will borrow an adze (nsompo), and cut out a tree." And he borrowed an adze and hollowed out a tree, and put his sister into it, and it flew, and went on high, and sat in a tree. And the hyena said, "Mother, I told you, and you refused; I said 'Let us eat her;' behold, now, how she goes away home." And the brother said, "My sister, you had a bad heart-you wanted to drive me away, saying, 'You shall not come (with me), you have sore eyes.' But to-day you shall see your mother." And they came out at her mother's village. And they said, "Tell us where you went," and he said, "My sister-they were going to eat her, and I helped her to escape." And her mother said, "This my child was disobedient. When men came (asking) that we might give her in marriage, she refused. But you accepted the hyena, and you drove away your brother, and he saved you. See!-you have seen us (again), you went very far astray (?), but do not begin (to act in this way) again." This tale connects itself with the widespread superstition of the wizard 2 I.e., hollowed out (ku semera), as in making a canoe. This is done with an adze. or were-wolf. Concerning hyena wizards (afiti; sing. mfiti). I may here note a few fragments of information obtained directly from natives. Boys are afraid to go out at night, lest they should meet aflti. The mfiti wanders about roads or paths, carrying a bright light, which he extinguishes on the approach of a human being. He can make himself as tall as the house and become small again. Sometimes you wake at night, and see one standing by your bedside; then, if you boldly defy him and say you will find him out by day and make him drink mwabvi, he will disappear and do you no harm; but you must have a stout heart (ku limba mtima) to do this. More than one boy professed to have seen a mfiti inside his hut at night. He was "just like ourselves" (chimodzimodzi ife tomwe-that is to say, a "black" man) but quite naked, without even a tewera round his waist. They were, however, too much frightened to survey him carefully, and speedily hid their heads under their blankets. Nchafuleni, already referred to, is the authority for the statement that, if you meet a mfiti on the road by night, and speak to him, you are struck dumb. This is not exactly a parallel case to Moeris and the Wolf. Old Silimani, the occupant, in 1894, of the "leper's hut" on the outskirts of the Mission grounds, averred that he sometimes heard the afiti passing his dwelling by night, "but," said he, "they cannot kill a man unless Mulungu gives them permission." The blaze of a bush fire one evening on the slope of Nyambadwe (the flames of which rose to an extraor 4 dinary height) was by him attributed to afiti, but he did not enter into details. In the Chipeta burying-ground, which is hidden in a nkalango, or thicket (some distance to the right of Sclater Road, as you come from the Mission), I saw 4 As a serious theft took place at Blantyre, 1 Katembo's version shows that the brother shortly after two distinct alarms of this kind disregarded this request. the boys, it is probable that some one found among it to his advantage to play on their superstitious fears. The native burglar is said to discard every scrap of his not too abundant clothing, and oil himself all over, so that he may not be easy to hold, if caught. 3 He says "your mother" (amako), not "our mother (amatu)-possibly because they were children of the same father by different wives. many holes, looking like shallow graves purposely left unfinished and open. These, I was told by a missionary's wife, were intended to catch the afit when they came to rob the gravespossibly in the shape of hyenas, but this I did not hear. Of sorcerers taking this shape I cannot say I have heard directly, but received some interesting information from a gentleman who had been for some time (two years, if I mistake not) in the Makanga country' without a white companion, and therefore had a good opportunity of becoming acquainted with the native language and customs. The Makanga believe that a wizard, when he dies, becomes a hyena, and in that capacity possesses a human wife, who is quite an ordinary character by day, but by night unbars the goatkraal or the hen-house for her husband and accompanies him into the bush with his prey. Mr. H.'s goat-kraal was broken into one night when (so he said himself) it was fastened so that no animal could have got in without assistance. He and the natives (in the morning, I suppose) tracked the hyena for some distance into the bush, and saw marks of his having dragged the goat with him. But alongside his spoor there ran the prints of little bare feet, like a girl's. The people pointed to them in triumph. "The fisi's wife let him into the kraal, and now she has gone into the bush with him to eat the goat." Mr. H. suggested that a person might have followed in order to drive away the fisi (they are notoriously cowardly brutes) and recover the goat; but they scouted such weak attempts at Euhemerism. I have only space for one more specimen, a curious little story, involving transformation into a tree. Like that of the "Lion's Bride," it was obtained in Angoniland. A mpande, it should be explained, is a precious ornament, a disk about two inches across, apparently cut 1 On the west bank of the Shire and south of Angoniland. The late Mr. Montague Kerr (in "The Far Interior") gives the Makanga a very bad character; during Mr. H.'s sojourn they seemed to live in constant terror of Angoni raids. from the centre of a large, white, spiral shell. They come from Quillimane and the coast generally, and are highly valued. I once tried (but unsuccessfully) to buy one of a man who was wearing a couple strung to his garters (if those can be called garters which have nothing to hold up) just below the knee. A frog carved a woman (out of a piece of wood) in the bush, and made her his wife, and put a mpande on (? in place of) her heart. The chief took his wife away from him. Her name was Njali-the frog's wife. The chief took her from him. (The frog) sent a wild pigeon (njiwa) to fetch the mpande, and she refused it, and (the pigeon) returned. He sent it a second time, and it went. And it took the mpande, and the woman died, and she was changed into a kachere-tree-that woman was changed into a tree. Is this mpande connected with the idea of the jewel, or other charm, which holds the life, as seen in many Indian and other stories? I am a little doubtful on this point, because, if the mpande were put into the figure instead of a heart, all that is intended may be that it was the removal of her heart which killed the woman. It all turns on the precise signification of the particle pa, which usually means on, or at (the meaning may be that it was fastened or hung over 'e region of the heart); and this is not a philological disquisition. But it is interesting to note that an old woman at Ntumbi, Angoniland, used to wear round her neck a curious ivory ornament, which she refused to part with, saying that it was her life, or soul (moyo). It was about two inches long and half an inch wide at the thickest part, with a hole drilled at the upper end. It might be roughly described as a rounded peg, tapering to a point, with a neck, or notch, at the top. It did not seem, so far as I could see, to be a representation of any object. There is a long story, which seems a great favorite, concerning a guinea 2 I remember several instances in Miss Frere's "Old Deccan Days," but cannot give the exact reference. บ fowl who performed the operation of cutting tattoo-marks (mpini) for certain girls. It also introduces cannibalism, and "a big bird with one great wing, one great eye, and one great leg;" but I could only secure two or three fragments, and cannot make much sense of them. It is interspersed with short songs, which all the children present joined in singing. The late Bishop Steere, in the preface to his "Swahili Tales” (p. vii.), alludes to this custom, and further says that the songs are frequently in a different dialect, or contain obsolete words. Certainly I find most Mang'anja songs, whether incorporated into stories or learnt independently, very difficult to understand. These tales are frequently told round the camp-fire at night, and there is a custom sometimes observed which re minds one of their connection with veillées de la masasa,1 if not du château. When the narrator pauses for breath the audience exclaim in chorus, "Ti ri tonse"-"We are all" (there). Probably the intention is to show that the listeners are still awake, and when the narrator finds that the answering voices have fallen to two or three, he stops. A. WERNER. 1 Masasa is a shed or booth hastily built of sticks and grass, for shelter on a journey, or run up for their temporary accommodation by gangs of laborers from a distance-e.g., the Angoni at Blantyre. Sometimes men on a journey will lie around the fire wrapped in their blankets, and spiration there suddenly flashed upon me the vision of my native countypractically unseen for two-and-thirty years. As in a dream I saw the league-long roller breaking in silver on the iron coast, and heard the plovers calling on the rolling moorlands that look down on Coquet and Aln, and felt the city of my youth quivering beneath the blows of her "clamorous iron flail." Unseen for two-and-thirty years, and the generation I had known gone from it forever, all the dear remembered faces of my childhood vanished with it! It was the memory of that generation that stood between me and the place I longed to see again. How could a man go back to the old home that was home no longer? But out of the far-off past came a sudden call before which my hesitation vanished-a call that found an echo in my heart; and thus it came about that, four-andtwenty hours later, I found myself seeking repose in the Station Hotel at Newcastle-on-Tyne. One station hotel resembles another as closely as twin peas in the pod. When I breakfasted next morning in the coffee-room there was nothing in my surroundings to remind me of the town once so familiar. That which struck me was the distinctly cosmopolitan air of the company at breakfast. At one table they were talking Russian, at another Spanish, whilst at a third, a demure Japanese with al drop off to sleep one by one, the rest continuing mond-shaped eyes was studying the the conversation till a late hour. From The Nineteenth Century. A NORTHERN PILGRIMAGE. London was hot-very hot. The season was growing stale. "No more dining out," said the wise physician; "try a few days in a bracing atmosphere." A bracing atmosphere! I drew in a long breath of the tepid air. I might have been inside an oven. Where, at such a time as this, was there anything that could be truly called bracing to be found short of the Arctic Circle? And then in a blessed moment of in тепи. It was not thus in the early sixties; but since then the world has discovered Newcastle, and has learned what the men of Tyneside can do for it. By and by some neighboring chairs were filled by a party of honest country-folk, and then there fell upon my ears the long-lost music of the Northumbrian tongue-the rolling gutturals, the sing-song cadence, that can be heard nowhere else in this world. knew that I was at home at last. The Central station at Newcastle, familiar to all who take the East Coast route to Scotland, is a vast, bewildering place.. The great bridge by which it is approached, spanning the Tyne at I a height of more than a hundred feet above high water mark, the blackened Norman keep that guards its portals, give it an air of distinction that no London railway station can command. It is the same station that I saw opened to the world more than six-and-forty years ago, when the opening ceremony consisted of a dinner to Robert Stephenson, the famous son of a still more famous father. But it has been more than doubled in size since then, and where once there was comparative spaciousness and leisure, there is now crowding and bustling, such as even Charing Cross cannot show. One was bewildered by the labyrinth of sidings and main lines that covered the vast roofed-in area. This, after all, was not the station I had once known. Out in the streets the landmarks of my youth were still to be seen. The noble lantern tower of St. Nicholas-the most graceful edifice of the kind in England-remained unchanged, though in my absence the building it adorns had been transformed from a mere parish church into a cathedral. Grey street, the thoroughfare which Newcastle owes to the genius and courage of Richard Grainger, and which is a glorified Regent street in stone instead. of stucco, was as stately as of yore; and the other well-planned harmonious thoroughfares that once made the town an example to the cities of the earth, were what they used to be. But now hurrying crowds filled the pavements, whilst beyond this central portion of the city spread a vast town of which I knew nothing. It had more than doubled in population since I last dwelt within its walls, and the area it covered had increased in a still larger proportion. As I wandered through the once-familiar streets that morning, or traversed new thoroughfares where houses had taken the place of hedge-rows, effacing the meadows where I had played as a child, two lines of Tennyson's were constantly running in my brain: There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O Earth, what changes hast thou seen! The deep seemed to have rolled above my own head. Like Esmond at his mother's grave, I felt as one who walked beneath the sea. It was sad enough to have to go to the quiet cemetery beside the moor, in order to find one's friends. It touched one's heart to the quick to stand again before the house that had once been a home, and to find that, instead of the far-reaching prospect over hill and moor and sea, all that the dwellers in it could now command was "the other side of the way." But these are the neces-. sary incidents of a return after so long an absence, and being in the nature of private griefs, they can hardly be obtruded here. There was much, however, in this view of a place which still dwelt freshly in my memory, as I had known it in 1860, that had a more public interest. It is impossible not to be struck by the immense advance in material wealth and luxury of life that had taken place in the interval. There were fewer ragged children in the streets. The houses were bigger and better decorated. The shops were infinitely better supplied than of yore. There were many handsome carriages. There was a general air of prosperity about the place that was not to be mistaken, and that I had not known in the past. For that prosperity Newcastle is largely indebted to the genius of one man. As a youth I remember a plain house in Westgate street, upon the door of which was a worn brass plate bearing the words, "Mr. Armstrong, solicitor." The Mr. Armstrong of forty years ago was an eminently respectable member of his profession. Some good people, it is true, shook their heads when they heard that instead of attending to conveyances and writs and mortgages, he had taken to dabbling in mechanics. Not that way does fortune lie in the profession of the law. But one day I was taken as a boy to see a remarkable new toy-it seemed nothing more-that had been placed upon the Quayside at Newcastle, where a few small steamers and Dutch merchantmen were in the habit of coming |