and the wares in the shops are hidden from the sidewalk by heavy curtains.  There is a park filled with curious trees and with flowers of gorgeous color, but the park is as deserted as a cemetery; along the principal streets stretch mosaic pavements formed of great blocks of white and black stone, they look like elongated checker-boards, but no one walks upon them, and though there are palaces painted blue, and government buildings in Pompeiian red, and churches in chaste gray and white, there are no sentries to guard the palaces, nor no black-robed priests enter or leave the churches.  They are like the palaces of a theatre, set on an empty stage, and waiting for the actors.  It will be a long time before the actors come to Mozambique.  It is, and will remain, a city of the fifteenth century.  It is now only a relic of a cruel and barbarous period, when the Portuguese governors, the “gentlemen adventurers,” and the Arab slave-dealers, under its blue skies, and hidden within its barred and painted walls, led lives of magnificent debauchery, when the tusks of ivory were piled high along its water-front, and the dhows at anchor reeked with slaves, and when in the market-place, where the natives now sit bargaining over a bunch of bananas or a basket of dried fish, their forefathers were themselves bought and sold.

In the five hundred years in which he has claimed the shore line of East Africa from south of Lorenco Marquez to north of Mozambique, and many hundreds of miles inland, the Portuguese has been the dog in the manger among nations.  In all that time he has done nothing to help the land or the people whom he pretends to protect, and he keeps those who would improve both from gaining any hold or influence over either.  It is doubtful if his occupation of the East Coast can endure much longer.  The English and the Germans now surround him on every side.  Even handicapped as they are by the lack of the seaports which he enjoys, they have forced their way into the country which lies beyond his and which bounds his on every side.  They have opened up this country with little railroads, with lonely lengths of telegraph wires, and with their launches and gunboats they have joined, by means of the Zambesi and Chinde Rivers, new territories to the great Indian Ocean.  His strip of land, which bars them from the sea, is still unsettled and unsafe, its wealth undeveloped, its people untamed.  He sits at his cafe at the coast and collects custom-dues and sells stamped paper.  For fear of the native he dares not march five miles beyond his sea-port town, and the white men who venture inland for purposes of trade or to cultivate plantations do so at their own risk, he can promise them no protection.