As we were now in the slave-market, it struck me that the sense of insecurity felt by the natives might account for the circumstance that those who have been sold as slaves and freed again, when questioned, profess to like the new state better than their primitive one.  They lived on rich, fertile plains, which seldom inspire that love of country which the mountains do.  If they had been mountaineers, they would have pined for home.  To one who has observed the hard toil of the poor in old civilized countries, the state in which the inhabitants here live is one of glorious ease.  The country is full of little villages.  Food abounds, and very little labor is required for its cultivation; the soil is so rich that no manure is required; when a garden becomes too poor for good crops of maize, millet, etc., the owner removes a little farther into the forest, applies fire round the roots of the larger trees to kill them, cuts down the smaller, and a new, rich garden is ready for the seed.  The gardens usually present the appearance of a large number of tall, dead trees standing without bark, and maize growing between them.  The old gardens continue to yield manioc for years after the owners have removed to other spots for the sake of millet and maize.  But, while vegetable aliment is abundant, there is a want of salt and animal food, so that numberless traps are seen, set for mice, in all the forests of Londa.  The vegetable diet leaves great craving for flesh, and I have no doubt but that, when an ordinary quantity of mixed food is supplied to freed slaves, they actually do feel more comfortable than they did at home.  Their assertions, however, mean but little, for they always try to give an answer to please, and if one showed them a nugget of gold, they would generally say that these abounded in their country.

One could detect, in passing, the variety of character found among the owners of gardens and villages.  Some villages were the pictures of neatness.  We entered others enveloped in a wilderness of weeds, so high that, when sitting on ox-back in the middle of the village, we could only see the tops of the huts.  If we entered at midday, the owners would come lazily forth, pipe in hand, and leisurely puff away in dreamy indifference.  In some villages weeds are not allowed to grow; cotton, tobacco, and different plants used as relishes are planted round the huts; fowls are kept in cages, and the gardens present the pleasant spectacle of different kinds of grain and pulse at various periods of their growth.  I sometimes admired the one class, and at times wished I could have taken the world easy for a time like the other.  Every village swarms with children, who turn out to see the white man pass, and run along with strange cries and antics; some run up trees to get a good view:  all are agile climbers throughout Londa.  At friendly villages they have scampered alongside our party for miles at a time.  We usually made a little hedge around our sheds; crowds of women came to the entrance of it, with children on their backs, and long pipes in their mouths, gazing at us for hours.  The men, rather than disturb them, crawled through a hole in the hedge, and it was common to hear a man in running off say to them, “I am going to tell my mamma to come and see the white man’s oxen.”