A little later one of the bridesmaids, whose toilet consisted of a dainty necklace of beads and a copper ring around one ankle, invited me to drink a draught of native beer.  The beer was in a large calabash, and I felt constrained to drink some of it.  These natives know how to make love, and they know how to make war, but, as my soul liveth, they don’t know how to make beer.  The stuff they gave me to drink was about as thick as boardinghouse cocoa; in colour it was like unto milk that a very dirty maid of all work had been stirring round in a soiled soup dish with an unwashed forefinger.  It had neither body nor soul in it, and was as insipid as a policeman at a prayer meeting.  Some of the niggers got gloriously merry on it, and sang songs and danced weird, unholy dances under its influence.  But it did not appeal to me in that way, possibly I was not educated up to its niceties.  All I know is that I became possessed of a strange yearning to get rid of what had been given me—­and get rid of it early.

The wedding joys were of a peculiar nature.  Bride and bridegroom, linked arm in arm, marched up and down on a pad about twenty yards in length, a nude minstrel marched in front, and drew unearthly music from a kind of mouth organ.  Girls squatting in the dust en route clapped their hands and chanted a chorus.  The groom hopped first on one leg and then on the other, and tried to look gorgeously happy; the bride kicked her satin skirts out behind, pranced along the track as gracefully as a lady camel in the mating season; behind the principal actors in the drama came a regiment of youths and girls, and the antics they cut were worthy of the occasion.  Now and again some dusky Don Juan would dig his thumb into the ribs of a daughter of Ham.  The lady would promptly squeal, and try to look coy.  It is not easy to look coy when you have not got enough clothes on your whole body to make a patch to cover a black eye; but still they tried it, for the sex seem to me to be much alike on the inside, whether they dress in a coat of paint or a coat of sealskin.

By-and-by the groom took his bride by the arm, and made an effort to induce her to leave her maids of honour and “trek” towards the cabin which henceforth was to be her home.  The lady pouted, and shook his hand off her arm; whilst the maidens laughed and clapped their hands, dancing in the dust-strewn sunlight with such high kicking action as would win fame for any ballet dancer in Europe.  The young men jeered the groom, and incited him to take charge of his own.  He hung down his ebony head and looked sillily sullen, and the bride continued to “pout.”  Have you ever seen a savage nigger wench pout, my masters?  Verily it is a sight worth travelling far to see.  First of all she wraps her mouth in a simper, and her lips look like a fold in a badly doubled blanket.  Then slowly, she draws the corners towards, the centre, just as the universe will be crumpled up on the Day of Judgment.  It is a beautiful