Judging the “nigger” merely as a human being, irrespective of sentiment, colour, and so forth, I can only say that in my estimation he and his are far better off in every respect than the average white labourer and his family in England.  These folk have plenty to eat, little to do, and are very jolly.  They would be perfectly happy if they only had a sufficient number of rifles and a large enough supply of ammunition to enable them to drive every white man clean away from their borders.

When I arrived at Jonathan’s village that warrior was away with a band of his young men, so that I could not see him, though I saw his son at a wedding which was being held when I reached the scene.  I was taken through rows of naked, grinning savages, of both sexes, to be introduced to the bride and bridegroom, whom I found to be a pair of mission converts.  When I saw the pair the shock nearly shook my boots off.  The bride, a full-blooded young negress, was dressed in a beautiful white satin dress, which fitted her as if it had been fired at her out of a gun.  It would not meet in front by about three inches, and the bodice was laced up by narrow bands of red silk, like a foot-baller’s jersey.  In her short, woolly hair she had pinned a wreath of artificial orange blossoms, which looked like a diadem of snow on a mid-winter mudheap.  Down her broad back there hung a great gauzy lace veil, big enough to make a fly-net for a cow camel in summer.  It was not fixed on to her dress, nor to her wreath, but was tied on to two little kinky curls at each side of her head by bright green ribbons, after the fashion of a prize filly of the draught order at a country fair.  Her hands were encased in a pair of white kid gloves, man’s size, and a pretty big man at that, for she had a gentle little fist that would have scared John L. Sullivan in his palmiest days.

When I was introduced to the newly shackled matron she put one of those gloved hands into mine with a simpering air of coyness that made me feel cold all over, for that hand in the kid glove reminded me of the day I took my first lesson from Laurence Foley, Australia’s champion boxer, and he had an eight-ounce glove on (thank Heaven!) on that occasion.  In her right hand the bride carried a fan of splendid ostrich feathers, with which she brushed the flies off the groom.  It was vast enough to have brushed away a toy terrier, to say nothing of flies, but it looked a toy in that giant fist.

The groom hung on to his bride’s arm like a fly to a sugar-stick.  He was a tall young man, dressed in a black frock coat, light trousers, braced up to show that he wore socks, shoes, white gloves, and a high-crowned hat.  He carried his bride’s white silk gingham in one hand, and an enormous bunch of flowers in the other.  He tried to look meek, but only succeeded in looking sly, hypocritical, and awfully uncomfortable.  At times he would look at his new spouse, and then a most unsaintly expression