followed by long-drawn ejaculations of "Wa-a-a-antu!" ("Men !"), "Eha-a! ("And these are men!"). Now imagine this! While we whites are loftily disputing among ourselves as to whether the beings before us are human, here were these creatures actually expressing strong doubts as to whether we whites are men! A dead silence prevailed for a short time, during which all the females dropped their lower jaws far down, and then cried out again Wa-a-a-a-a-antu!" ("Men!"). The lower jaws, indeed, dropped so low that when, in a posture of reflection, they put their hands up to their chins, it really looked as if they had done so to lift the jaws up to their proper place and to sustain them there. And in that position they pondered upon the fact that there were men "white all over" in this queer, queer world! The open mouths gave one a chance to note the healthy state and ruby color of the tongues, palates and gums, and, above all, the admirable order and brilliant whiteness of each set of teeth. "Great events from trivial causes spring;" and while I was trying to calculate how many kubaba (measure of two pounds) of millet-seed would be requisite to fill all these Dutch-oven mouths, and how many cowries would be required to pay for such a large quantity of millet, and wondering at the antics of the juveniles of the population, whose uncontainable, irrepressible wonder seemed to find its natural expression in hopping on one leg, thrusting their right thumbs into their mouths to repress the rising scream, and slapping the hinder side of the thighs to express or give emphasis to what was speechless, while thus engaged, and just thinking it was time to depart, it happened that one of the youthful innocents already described, more restless than his brothers, stumbled across a long heavy pole which was leaning insecurely against one of the trees. The pole fell, striking one of my men severely on the head, and all at once there went up from the women a genuine. and unaffected cry of pity, and their faces expressed so lively a sense of tender sympathy with the wounded man that my heart, keener than my eyes, saw through the disguise of filth, nakedness and ochre the human heart beating for another's suffering, and I then recognized and hailed them as indeed my own poor and degraded sisters. Under the new light which had dawned on me, I reflected that I had done some wrong to my dusky relatives, and that they might have been described less harshly and introduced to the world with less disdain. Before I quitted the village they made me still more regret my former haughty feelings, for the chief and his subjects loaded my men with bounties of bananas, chickens, Indian corn and malafu (palm-wine), and escorted me respectfully far beyond the precincts of the village and their fields, parting from me at last with the assurance that, should I ever happen to return by their country, they would endeavor to make my second visit to Uhombo much more agreeable than my first had been. On the 5th October our march from Uhombo brought us to the frontier village of Manyema, which is called Riba-Riba. It is noteworthy as the starting-point of another order of African architecture. The conical style of hut is exchanged for the square hut with more gradually sloping roof, wattled, and sometimes neatly plastered with mud, especially those in Manyema. Here, too, the thin-bodied and long-limbed goat to which we had been accustomed gave place to the short-legged, large-bodied and capaciousuddered variety of Manyema. The gray parrots with crimson tails here also first began to abound, and the hoarse growl of the fierce and shy "soko" (gorilla?) was (gorilla?) was first heard. From the day we cross the watershed that divides the affluents of the Tanganika from the head-waters of the Luama there is observed a gradual increase in the splendor of Nature. By slow degrees she exhibits to us as we journey westward her rarest beauties, her wealth and all the profligacy of her vegetation. In the forests of Miketo and on the western slopes of the Goma mountains she scatters with liberal hand her luxuries of fruits, and along the banks of streams we see revealed the wild profusion of her bounties. As we increase the distance from the Tanganika we find the land disposed in graceful lines and curves; ridges heave up, separating valley from valley; hills lift their heads in the midst of the basins; and mountain-ranges, at greater distances apart, bound wide prospects wherein the lesser hill-chains, albeit of dignified proportions, appear but as agreeable diversities of scenery. Over the whole Nature has flung a robe of verdure of the most fervid tints. She has bidden the mountains loose their streamlets, has commanded the hills and ridges to bloom, filled the valleys with vegetation breathing perfume; for the rocks she has woven garlands of creepers, and the stems of trees she has draped with moss; and sterility she has banished from her domain. Yet Nature has not produced a soft, velvety, smiling England in the midst of Africa. Far from it. She is here too robust and prolific. Her grasses are coarse, and wound like knives and needles; her reeds are tough and tall as bamboos; her creepers and convolvuli are of cable thickness and length; her thorns are hooks of steel; her trees shoot up to a height of a hundred feet. We find no pleasure in straying in search of wild flowers, and game is left undisturbed because of the difficulty of moving about, for, once the main path is left, we find ourselves over head amongst thick, tough, unyielding, lacerating grass. At Manyema the beauty of Nature becomes terrible, and in the expression of her powers she is awful. The language of Swahili has words to paint her in every mood. English, rich as it is, is found insufficient. In the former we have the word pori for a forest, an ordinary thickly-wooded tract, but for the forests of Manyema it has four special words, mohuro, mwitu, mtambani and msitu. For mohuro we might employ the words "jungle forest;" for mwitu, "dense woods;" but for msitu and mtambani we have no single equivalent, nor could we express their full meaning without a series of epithets ending with "tangled jungle" or "impervious underwood in the midst of a dense forest," for such is, in reality, the nature of a Manyema msitu. HENRY M. STANLEY. HUMILITY. HUMILITY is a virtue all preach, none practise, and yet everybody is content to hear. The master thinks it good doctrine for his servant, the laity for the clergy, and bought for him a wooden dish, of the value the clergy for the laity. If a man does not take notice of that excellency and perfection that is in himself, how can he be thankful to God, who is the Author of all excellency and perfection? Nay, if a man hath too mean an opinion of himself, it will render him unserviceable both to God and man. Pride may be allowed to this or that degree, else a man cannot keep up his dignity. In gluttons there must be eating, in drunkenness there must be drinking; it is not the eating nor it is not the drinking that is to be blamed, but the exSo in pride. cess. JOHN SELDEN. of twopence, out of which he was obliged to eat. While doing this the little grandson, a child of about four years old, began to drag about pieces of wood and to collect them together. "What are you doing there, my child?" inquired his father. "I am going to make a little trough," answered the child, "that father and mother may eat out of when I am a man.” The parents looked at each other for a moment, and then began to weep, at the same time replacing the old grandfather at the table; and from this time they showed all possible kindness to him, and were indulgent toward those infirmities which were the effect of age and weakness. Translation of MATILDA LOUISA DAVIS. THOUGHTS FOR THE STUDENT. From the GERMAN OF JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE. THE NATURE OF THE SCHOLAR. him to spill his soup on the tablecloth, and EVERYTHING is vulgar and ignoble sometimes even he was not able to swallow what he had carried to his mouth. This disgusted his son and his wife, and they obliged him to sit in a corner behind the stove, giving him his food in an earthenware dish, and not always enough of it, which made him look wistfully toward the table with tears in his eyes. One day, his trembling hands not being able to support the dish, it fell to the ground and was broken, which annoyed his daughterin-law very much, and she expressed her displeasure at the poor old man. He, however, made no reply, only sighed deeply, and they which weakens spiritual power. I shall instance idleness; to mention drunkenness or sensuality would be below the dignity of our subject. To live without occupation of any sort, to cast a dull, unmeaning gaze around us, will soon make our minds dull and unmeaning. This propensity to non-existence, to spiritual torpor, becomes a habit, a second nature; it surprises us in our studies or while listening to our teacher, creates a chasm in what would otherwise be a strictly connected whole, interposes itself here and there between ideas which we should have bound together, so that we cannot comprehend even those which are | lose all faith in his own resolutions because most easy and intelligible. How this pro- he has so often determined, and again deterpensity should seize upon youth may well mined, to do that which nevertheless he has remain unaccountable even to men of the never done. Then he feels it necessary to deepest penetration and judgment, and in flee from himself; he can no longer turn most cases it would be no delusion to seek inward to his own thoughts lest he be covered its cause in some secret infirmity or vice. with shame before them; he shuns no society Youth is the age of newly-developed power; of newly-developed power; so much as his own, and deliberately gives everywhere there are still impulses and prin- himself up to dissipation and self-forgetfulciples destined to burst forth into new cre- ness. Not so the upright student: he keeps ations. The peculiar character of youth is his purpose; and whatever he has resolved restless and interrupted activity; left to itself, to do, that he does, were it only because he it can never be without occupation. To see has resolved to do it. For the same reason it slothful is the sight of winter in the time that he must be guided by his own purof spring, the blight and withering of a pose and his own insight-he will not become newly-opened flower. Were it naturally a slave to the opinion of others, or even to possible that this idleness should attempt to the general the general opinion. It is, doubtless, of all gain dominion over the true-minded and things most ignoble when man-out of too virtuous student, he would never for a mo- great complacency, which at bottom is cowment endure it. In the eternal thought of ardice and want of spirit, or out of indolence, God his spiritual power has its source; it is which prevents him from thinking for himthus his most precious treasure, and he will self and drawing the principles of his connot suffer it to fall into impotent rigidity duct from his own mind-gives himself up before it has fulfilled its task. He watches to others and relies upon them rather than unceasingly over himself, and never allows upon himself. Such a one has, indeed, no himself to rest in slothful inaction. It is self within him, and believes in no self withonly for a short period that this exertion of in him, but goes as a suppliant to others, and the will is needed; afterward its result con- entreats of them, one after another, to lend tinues of itself, for it is happily as easy-or him their personality. How can such a one even more easy, because it is more natural—regard himself as honorable and holy, when for man to accustom himself to industry he neither knows nor acknowledges his own than to idleness, and after a time passed in sustained activity it becomes impossible for him to live without employment. Lastly, everything is vulgar and ignoble which robs man of respect for himself, of faith in himself, and of the power of reckoning with confidence upon himself and his purposes. Nothing is more destructive of character than for man to being? The true-minded student will not make himself a slave to common opinion; nevertheless, he will accommodate himself to establish customs where these are in themselves indifferent simply because he honors himself. The educated The educated youth grows up amid these customs; were he to cast them off, he must of necessity deliberately resolve to do so, and attract notice and attention to himself by his singularities and his offences against decorum. How should he whose time is occupied with weightier matters find leisure to ponder such a subject? Is the matter so important, and is there no other way in which he can distinguish himself, that he must take refuge in a petty peculiarity? "No!" answers the noble-minded student; "I am here to comprehend weightier things than outward manners, and I will not have it appear that I am too awkward to understand these. I will not by such littleness cause myself and my class to be despised and hated by the uncharitable or good-naturedly laughed at by those of better disposition; my fellow-citizens of other classes or of my own, my teachers, shall have it in their power to honor or respect me as a man in every relation of human life." And thus in all his relations does the life of the studious youth who respects himself flow on blameless and lovely. THE PROGRESSIVE SCHOLAR. Now, for the first time, when we have to accompany the student from the academy into life, we must call to mind that the studies and character of the progressive scholar are not necessarily completed with his residence at the university; nay, we will even perceive a ground upon which we say that, properly speaking, his studies have only their true beginning after his academic course has closed. This much, however, remains true as the sure result of what has been already said-that the youth who during his residence at the university is not at least inspired with respect for the holiness of knowledge, and does not at least learn to honor his own person to such an extent as not to render it unworthy of his high vocation, will never afterward attain to any true sense of the dignity of knowledge; and, whatever part he may perform in life, he will perform it as a piece of common handicraft, and with the sentiment of a hireling who has no other motive to his labor than the pay which he is to receive for it. To say anything more of such a one lies beyond the boundaries of our present subject. But the student who is penetrated with the conviction that the essential purpose of his studies will be frustrated unless the idea acquire an intrinsic form and independent life within him, and that in the highest perfection-he will by no means lay aside his studies and scientific labors when he leaves the university. Even if he be compelled by outward necessity to enter upon a secular employment, he will devote to knowledge all the time and ability which he can spare from that employment, and will neglect no opportunity which presents itself of attaining a higher culture, assured that the continual exercise of his faculties in the pursuit of learning will be very profitable to him even in the transaction of his ordinary business. Amid the brilliant distinctions of office, and even in mature age, he will restlessly strive and labor to master the idea, never resigning the hope of becoming greater than he now is, so long as strength permits him to indulge it. Without this untiring effort much true genius would be wholly lost, for scientific talent usually unfolds itself more slowly the higher and purer its essential nature, and its clear development waits for mature years manly strength. and Translation of WILLIAM SMITH. |