There Is Also Another Class Of Apparition, Of Which I Have Met With
Two Instances, One Among Pure Negroes (Okyon); The Other Among Pure
Bantu (Kangwe).
I will give the Bantu version of the affair,
because at Okyon the incident had happened a good time before the
details were told me, and in the Bantu case they had happened the
previous evening.
But there was very little difference in the main
facts of the case, and it was an important thing because in both
cases the underlying idea was sacrificial.
The woman who told me was an exceedingly intelligent, shrewd,
reliable person. She had been to the factory with some trade, and
had got a good price for it, and so was in a good temper on her
return home in the evening. She got out of her canoe and leaving
her slave boy to bring up the things, walked to her house, which was
the ordinary house of a prosperous Igalwa native, having two
distinct rooms in it, and a separate cook-house close by in a clean,
sandy yard. She trod on some nastiness in the yard, and going into
the cook-house found the slave girls round a very small and
inefficient fire, trying to cook the evening meal. She blew them up
for not having a proper fire; they said the wood was wet, and would
not burn. She said they lied, and she would see to them later, and
she went into the chamber she used for a sleeping apartment, and
trod on something more on the floor in the dark; those good-for-
nothing hussies of slaves had not lit her palm-oil lamp, and
mentally forming the opinion that they had been out flirting during
her absence, and resolving to teach them well the iniquity of such
conduct, she sat down on her bed into a lot of messy stuff of a
clammy, damp nature.
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