tary leader or field-marshal under whose orders the soldiery act, for I have found no evidence of there being such. The authority is surely well centralized, however, for such unity of action could come only from some single source.

Always on the move through the vegetation, evidently in search of food, they attack anything en route, dead or alive, that they can find to eat, human beings included. And having once opened their attack, they never desist or retreat from anything but fire. No living creature that cannot escape by fleeing or by fighting them with fire can survive their onslaught. It is almost incredible what big things they sometimes kill and how quickly they kill them. Any animal, large or small, even to the elephant itself, which is closely confined or lies helpless from wounds or sickness, falls an easy victim to their swarms.

A Pangwé

Often the drivers descend upon the house of a human being, and unless they are driven back with fire, they take the place by storm. We often fought them with torches of finely split bamboo, waving them over the advancing front ranks, killing the ants by the tens of thousands and putting their vast armies

to utter rout. They are sure to make one's house a visit if one has anything spoiling in the cupboard. They know it before the householder does. I have sometimes been apprised of the condition of my cupboard by the advance of a host of raiders. A visit from the drivers is not without its benefits, however, once one gets accustomed to turning over his house to them for the time being. They are wonderful destroyers of the many kinds of vermin which infest the walls and bamboo roof-mats of a house. Our walls were lined with bamboo pitch and covered with newspapers, an arrangement which furnished unusual shelter for vermin despite all the measures I took to prevent it. But when the drivers came, they worked with the thoroughness of a vacuum-cleaner. They swarmed up the walls and roof into every cranny, however small, killing and eating any kind of vermin they found there, then passing on to the next hiding-place to do likewise. I would usually take a chair and move to the far part of the house from that upon which they began. When they had finished with the first room, I would move back into it and allow the ants free play in the remaining rooms. Upon their leaving a room there was always a number of skeletons of cockroaches, mice, an occasional small lizard, and other vermin left lying on the floor, the drivers having hunted them out and eaten them forthwith. Then for a short time at least we would be absolutely free of house pests of every description. was a boon at times to have such a visit from these destroying hordes, inasmuch as my cupboard was beyond their reach. When, for any reason, we did not want to receive the house-cleaners, we had the native servants drive them back with the torches some hundreds of yards, so that the colony, when again formed and on the march, would take another direction from that in which my house lay.

It

It is uncanny, the way in which the drivers pick the bones of their victim, whatever the size of the animal. They eat every particle of grease from the hair as well as the bones, leaving only hair, bones, and the membrane which covers them, all as dry as paper. Not

the tiniest bit of flesh is left anywhere. They even consume any marrow that seeps through the bones. I have often turned this to advantage when coming into possession of the carcass of a chimpanzee or a gorilla when the skin had already begun to soften from the early decomposition in that climate. Placing the carcass in a box with cracks to admit the ants, but sufficiently strong to keep out other things, I would have it taken into the bush at some distance from the house and placed in the fork of a tree. On the ground it would be exposed to the inroads of white ants, which are not such clean workers as the drivers. In the course of one or two weeks I would return to find the skeleton completely cleaned save for the periostium and the dry hair. This proved a very convenient method of mascerating a skeleton. It is a common practice among traders when they wish to preserve the skulls of elephants, buffalo, hippopotamuses, or other animals.

The methods of fishing of the driver ants are unique. I have seen them spread out on the sand at low tide in a place where fresh water is seeping through. When a sand - shrimp or sand - flea,

(which is a tiny white animal like a shrimp and about the size of a grain of rye, only thinner), hops upon the sand, the nearest yeoman or menial driver seizes it. Other yeomen and menials hurry to join in the attack. I have seen a shrimp leap short distances with one or two drivers clinging to it. But if it puts up much of a fight against the poorly armed yeomen and menials, the nearest soldier ant comes over and kills it in a twinkling with its huge hooked mandibles. Then the menials drag the victim up under the dense vegetation above the high-water mark, and all have a feast on the carcass. I have never yet seen them devour a sand

shrimp in the open. It is very singular.

The drivers are very wise about what they attack, in that they never attempt to kill a beetle or a large millipede that the natives call nkongola. This is surely because of the hard shell of the

An ivory merchant

beetle; for the nkongola has a hard, segmented shell which makes it impervious to ant attacks when it rolls itself up, as it always does when in danger.

Among the former dangers of the jungle, indigenous to the soil of central Africa, that an explorer had to face, was that of being captured and eaten by cannibals. In the interior lies the territory of the Pangwé tribe of natives, who from time immemorial have been the most incorrigible cannibals in the world. And yet they are the most industrious, progressive, and certainly the most intelligent of any of the Ba-ntu races of central Africa. These natives are the shrewdest traders of all their kind in

In

dealing with every one. They out-Jew the worst Jews of fact or fiction. their trading with Europeans they are as full of tricks as the most unscrupuIlous white man who has no law to restrain him. It is almost impossible to drive a trade with them without being cheated in some way or other before its conditions are fulfilled.

These people, while much modified in their modes of living in recent years, yet practise some truly revolting customs of cannibalism. It is true that some of the natives have come under the influence of the white man's code of morals sufficiently to deny that they eat human beings, but the denial is as far as they go with their reformation. The facts speak for themselves, and until recently it was extremely dangerous for a white man to venture into their country on any mission whatsoever. an undeniable fact that they eat their own dead, even those who die of natural

causes.

It is

In the matter of the capture of strangers and travelers for eating they formerly had a strange code of honor which has saved the life of many a victim. If one sought refuge or shelter in a village, one was as safe as if its inhabitants were one's own people. They regarded him as sacred so long as he called their village his home; they considered him a member of the family, which with its ramifications composed one or more villages. He was still in no danger if he went into the forest, provided he did so by consent of the chief and expressly stated that he still considered the village his real and continuous home, to which he would shortly return. But if he departed from the village for permanent residence elsewhere, he returned immediately to the status of a wild animal in their eyes, and was the lawful property of any one who found him, subject to capture without any of the protection he formerly enjoyed. They also had a ceremony of adopting a stranger into the tribe, which was a variation of the bloodbrotherhood ceremony once practised in the Moyen Congo, only the Pangwés did not actually effect a transfusion of blood.

The custom in some tribes of acclaim

ing a visiting white man king of a family of one or more villages, and thereby imposing upon him the obligation of giving a great celebration, is a ludicrous commentary on regal honors. Twice in my African experiences I have been made a king, once of the Rokolo family of the Orungo tribe, and again of the Arunduma family of the Nkomis. The white man, as is expected, distributes tobacco, rum, and native wines, and a great festivity prevails in his domain. This, however, is only for a time, and everybody forgets about it in a few weeks at most. A village may thus have many successive kings, the former one enjoying a status technically known among more stable dynasties as "pretenders." As a matter of fact, it is an honor that carries with it some patriarchal or advisory prestige, but has no other significance save the desire of the natives for a celebration at the expense of a congenial white man.

The relations between the natives and white men vary widely in the different colonies of Africa. The Germans have succeeded in getting themselves generally hated and feared by the natives. The terror of the German name has been effectively spread in their holdings in Africa, even though it failed in Europe. At the beginning of the war the Germans hanged in Duala, the capital of the German Kamerun, eighteen natives, including old King Bell and most of the male members of his family. King Bell admitted some minor offense which merited no more than a reprimand or at most a short prison sentence. It appears that the greatest crime of which these men were guilty consisted in being able to speak English, and they would thus be able to give information to the enemies of the German Empire.

The brutality and trickery which the Germans habitually practised upon the natives employed on board ship was impressed upon me by an incident which occurred at Monrovia on the trip prior to the one just completed. The German ship on which I was sailing stopped at Monrovia, Liberia, and I desired to go ashore to visit the American consul there. The officers of the ship protested vigorously, telling me that any one who

went ashore from a German ship would be insulted and attacked because the Germans were fiercely hated by the natives, even in this colony of American negroes, because of their treatment of their black deck-hands. I learned that the Germans avoided the intercolonial agreement prohibiting flogging at sea by sending the guilty negro ashore at the first German port with a letter to the commandant, who had him flogged on land and sent back to the ship with a threat of worse treatment next time. The British and French, however, treat the natives fairly and justly in the main. In fact, I think the British pamper them too much.

The purpose of the expedition, save the moving-pictures, which depended on our colleagues who had gone into war service, was in time completed. The taxidermist had reached the end of his second period of assignment, and I had been repeatedly advised by my physician to leave the colony at once, so the expedition came to an end.

At Bordeaux, on the way home, an amusing incident occurred. The American consul there, Mr. Bucklin, gave me an introduction to General Rhodes, the American commandant of the depart

ment, or European port of embarkation. The general invited me to his headquarters and to go with him to inspect two steamers being loaded with American troops bound for home. A French field band of some sixty pieces was on the pier playing American and French national airs, with occasional bursts of American rag-time. When we stepped out of the automobile the general was explaining to me some aspects of the scene. Suddenly cameras began snapping furiously all about us, and I wondered why they were snapping the general so eagerly when he was permanently assigned there. A colonel approached and addressed the general in an undertone, whereupon the latter laughed and turned to me.

"They have mistaken you for Clemenceau," he said. "I have told them who you really are, and now I suppose you will have to submit to another volley of snap-shots."

The colonel went over and spoke to the men with the cameras. They all quickly readjusted their instruments and came closer than ever to photograph the stray American who, according to their way of thinking, closely resembled the French "tiger."

B

Birdie Reduces

By HELEN R. MARTIN

Illustrations by George Van Werveke

EFORE it goes any furder,
I got to break it to you,
Birdie, that I-I ain't
marryin' you; I changed

my mind yet. I hope you won't take it very hard, but this good whiles back a'ready I did n't feel fer gettin' married to you; only I had n't the nerve to disappoint you so." Amos Newswanger faltered wretchedly as he and his "girl," seated side by side in two rocking-chairs on the front porch of Birdie's home, rocked monotonously, as every engaged couple in the village of Fokendauqua was rocking on a front porch on this mild September Sunday evening, the conventional courting time among rural Pennsylvanians.

"Yes, I seen it for myself a'ready that you was n't satisfied no more," Birdie mournfully admitted. "Is it that you 're takin' interest in some other one-or what?"

"No, I ain't got no other one in mind. It ain't that; it 's-well-" Amos floundered in painful embarrassment.

"Is it that you don't take to me no more?"

"No, it ain't that neither. I like you good enough so far forth as that goes. You 're the only girl I ever did take to. You 're nicer complected than most, and I like the color you wear your hair. But-well-say, Birdie, it ain't no use your keepin' up hopes. I 'm sorry, but I can't go it."

"Is it that you 're a-goin' to go to this here war?"

"No, it ain't. I ain't a-goin' to no

war that was all brang about by no lady! Yes, where there 's ladies, there is trouble yet."

"What lady?" Birdie dully inquired. "That there Alice Lorraine that the King of France and the King of Germany is scrappin' about. Don't you read the papers any?" he asked reprovingly.

"I don't read 'em much; and, anyhow, I skip the war part. It ain't none of my affairs. It don't do me nothin'. Say, Amos, it ain't no more 'n right for you to tell me what for you are throwin' me over," said Birdie, aggrieved. "That it ain't."

"I know it ain't. Well, say, Birdie, I could n't stand it if my missus was so stared at by all the folks like what you always are. Why, when I took you along to the county fair here last week, just mind how the folks rubbered to look at you! Yes, it gim me a shamed face yet. And I misoverheard a gentleman and lady gigglin' at you and sayin', 'That ought to take a fat prize at this here fair!' It stands to reason, Birdie, a man don't like it fer his missus to be sich a joke fer folks."

"But it ain't my fault. I would n't be so stout if I could otherwise help it," pleaded Birdie.

"That's why I can't marry you, Birdie because you can't help bein' fat."

"But, Amos, I got my Aus Tire' all ready. And no other man 'll want to marry me, as fat as what I am."

"That 's it. I'm as good as other ones, ain't I? So why must I marry

1Household furnishings.