Coffee Is Brought In Large Quantities By The Abyssinian Merchants, Who Buy Cotton In Exchange, For The Manufacture Of Clothes According To Their Own Fashion.

I bought a quantity of excellent coffee at the rate of two dollars for thirty-five pounds, equal to about two and three-quarters pence a pound.

Sheds were arranged in lines; these were occupied by the coffee merchants with their stores, while a great stock of cotton in bales, to the number of some thousand, were piled in rows in an open space. Not far from the mass of goods was a confusion of camels, asses, and mules that had formed the means of transport. I now met an Italian merchant, with whom I subsequently became intimately acquainted, Signor Angelo Bolognesi--he had arrived from Khartoum to purchase coffee and bees'-wax. We were delighted to meet a civilized European after so long an absence. For some months we had had little intercourse with any human beings beyond the hunters that had composed our party, in countries that were so wild and savage, that the print of a naked foot upon the sand had instinctively brought the rifle upon full cock. Our European society was quickly increased: two German missionaries had arrived, en ronte for an establishment that had been set on foot in the heart of Abyssinia, under the very nose of the King Theodore, who regarded missionaries as an unsavoury odour. Both were suffering from fever, having foolishly located themselves in a hut close to the foul stench of dead animals on the margin of the polluted stream, the water of which they drank. One of these preachers was a blacksmith, whose iron constitution had entirely given way, and the little strength that remained, he exhausted in endless quotations of texts from the Bible, which he considered applicable to every trifling event or expression. I regretted that I could not agree with him in the propriety of invading Abyssinia with Bible extracts, as the natives attached as great importance to their own particular form of Christianity, as any other of the numerous sects that unhappily divide that beautiful religion into schisms; any fresh dogma introduced by strangers might destroy the union of the Abyssinian Church, and would be not only a source of annoyance to the priesthood, but would most probably influence them and the king against all Europeans.

The blacksmith assured me that the special mission upon which he was employed was the conversion of the Abyssinian Jews. I suggested that we had a few Jews in England, that might offer a fair field for an experiment at home, before we commenced at so distant a country as Abyssinia; but I could not persuade the blacksmith, whose head was as hard as his anvil; he had fully persuaded himself that the word of God (according to HIS OWN translation of it) was the hammer with which, selon son metier, he was to drive his views of the truth into the thick skulls of the people.

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