Who Can Blame These Outcasts From House And Home For Stealing To Save Their Wretched Lives, Or Wonder That The Owners Protected The Little All, On Which Their Own Lives Depended, With Club And Spear?

We were informed by Mr. Waller of the dreadful blight which had befallen the once smiling Shire Valley.

His words, though strong, failed to impress us with the reality. In fact, they were received, as some may accept our own, as tinged with exaggeration; but when our eyes beheld the last mere driblets of this cup of woe, we for the first time felt that the enormous wrongs inflicted on our fellow-men by slaving are beyond exaggeration.

Wherever we took a walk, human skeletons were seen in every direction, and it was painfully interesting to observe the different postures in which the poor wretches had breathed their last. A whole heap had been thrown down a slope behind a village, where the fugitives often crossed the river from the east; and in one hut of the same village no fewer than twenty drums had been collected, probably the ferryman's fees. Many had ended their misery under shady trees - others under projecting crags in the hills - while others lay in their huts, with closed doors, which when opened disclosed the mouldering corpse with the poor rags round the loins - the skull fallen off the pillow - the little skeleton of the child, that had perished first, rolled up in a mat between two large skeletons. The sight of this desert, but eighteen months ago a well peopled valley, now literally strewn with human bones, forced the conviction upon us, that the destruction of human life in the middle passage, however great, constitutes but a small portion of the waste, and made us feel that unless the slave-trade - that monster iniquity, which has so long brooded over Africa - is put down, lawful commerce cannot be established.

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