to be worth cattle? Of the councillors and generals, how the land could
be protected from its foes when they were commanded to lay down the
spear? Of the soldiers, whose only trade was war, how it would please
them to till the fields like girls? Dismay took hold of the nation, and
although they were much loved, there was open talk of killing or driving
away the king and Nodwengo who favoured the white man, and of setting up
Hafela in their place.

At length the crisis came, and in this fashion. The Amasuka, like many
other African tribes, had a strange veneration for certain varieties
of snakes which they declared to be possessed by the spirits of their
ancestors. It was a law among them that if one of these snakes entered
a kraal it must not be killed, or even driven away, under pain of death,
but must be allowed to share with the human occupants any hut that
it might select. As a result of this enforced hospitality deaths from
snake-bite were numerous among the people; but when they happened in
a kraal its owners met with little sympathy, for the doctors explained
that the real cause of them was the anger of some ancestral spirit
towards his descendants. Now, before John was despatched to instruct
Owen in the language of the Amasuka a certain girl was sealed to him
as his future wife, and this girl, who during his absence had been
orphaned, he had married recently with the approval of Owen, who at
this time was preparing her for baptism. On the third morning after his
marriage John appeared before his master in the last extremity of grief
and terror.

"Help me, Messenger!" he cried, "for my ancestral spirit has entered our
hut and bitten my wife as she lay asleep."

"Are you mad?" asked Owen. "What is an ancestral spirit, and how can it