consult about it, and at length go away without selling it; next day they
try another merchant, talk, consider, get puzzled and go off as on the
previous day, and continue this course daily until they have perhaps seen
every merchant in the village, and then at last end by selling the
precious tusk to some one for even less than the first merchant had
offered. Their love of dawdling in the transaction arises from the self-
importance conferred on them by their being the object of the wheedling
and coaxing of eager merchants, a feeling to which even the love of gain
is subordinate.

The native medical profession is reasonably well represented. In
addition to the regular practitioners, who are a really useful class, and
know something of their profession, and the nature and power of certain
medicines, there are others who devote their talents to some speciality.
The elephant doctor prepares a medicine which is considered indispensable
to the hunters when attacking that noble and sagacious beast; no hunter
is willing to venture out before investing in this precious nostrum. The
crocodile doctor sells a charm which is believed to possess the singular
virtue of protecting its owner from crocodiles. Unwittingly we offended
the crocodile school of medicine while at Tette, by shooting one of these
huge reptiles as it lay basking in the sun on a sandbank; the doctors
came to the Makololo in wrath, clamouring to know why the white man had
shot their crocodile.

A shark's hook was baited one evening with a dog, of which the crocodile
is said to be particularly fond; but the doctors removed the bait, on the
principle that the more crocodiles the more demand for medicine, or
perhaps because they preferred to eat the dog themselves. Many of the
natives of this quarter are known, as in the South Seas, to eat the dog
without paying any attention to its feeding. The dice doctor or diviner