Obie Was In The Habit Of Sending Them A Fowl, Or A Yam Or Two Every Morning, But As They Were Ten In Number, It Made But A Slender Meal, And It Was Barely Sufficient To Keep Them From Actual Starvation.

To stop, if possible, the sullen murmurings of their people, they were now reduced to the painful necessity of begging, but they might as well have addressed their petitions to the stones and trees, and thereby have spared themselves the mortification of a refusal.

They never experienced a more stinging sense of their own humbleness and imbecility than on such occasions, and never had they greater need of patience and lowliness of spirit. In most African towns and villages, they had been regarded as demi-gods, and treated in consequence with universal kindness, civility, and veneration; but here, alas! what a contrast, they were classed with the most degraded and despicable of mankind, and were become slaves in a land of ignorance and barbarism, whose savage natives treated them with brutality and contempt. It would be hard to guess whence these unkindly feelings originated, but they felt that they had not deserved them, yet the consciousness of their own insignificance sadly militated against every idea of self-love or self-importance, and taught them a plain and useful moral lesson. Although they made the most charitable allowances for the Eboe people, they were, notwithstanding, obliged to consider them the most inhospitable tribe, as well as the most covetous and uncivil, that they were acquainted with.

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