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the feasts of Mahomet, to be exercised before the king. On these occasions the king sends previously to the Laman and some of the other officers described, to come over, and to bring with them each a quota of their respective provincial troops. Upon this they assemble. Their exercise is a sort of shamfight. They fire in the air, and then run after one another. This is all, and it is done without any regularity or order.

To support these, and other expenses of the government, certain taxes are established. In the interior villages they consist of oxen, millet, and produce of every sort, and, in those upon the coast, of fish, and of such goods as are brought there by the Europeans. In these villages the Gueraff collects them annually, and sends them to the king. In the villages, however, which border upon the king's residence, a different sort of tax prevails. These are obliged to maintain the king, that is, to furnish his table with wine, victuals, and whatever he may want. One village supplies him one week, and another another, and so on each in its turn. On the inhabitants of these there is no annual tax. This account will hold good except in the villages of the Serreres, who are esteemed a more wild people. The king is obliged to send to these an officer called Sarsar, to collect their taxes. officer, or travelling collector, stays perhaps fifteen days at a village, and then passes to another, and so on, till he has made a collection for the whole.

This

Having now spoken of the king and of the administration of his government, I come to the second order in the state, or to those of the blood royal. Of these it may be sufficient to say, that they live in different parts of the country, that they preserve the remembrance of their descent, and that they possess the privilege in consequence of it, of never being sold as slaves.

The next order consists of those, who may be denominated the people. Among these there is no distinction in point of rights, except in the sacerdotal villages, (of which something will be said hereafter) and the members of these, while they stay there, like those of the blood royal, can never be visited by the pillage: nor is there any one class, which is considered above another, except it may be that of the different officers of the king. There are old and young, rich and poor. The old have no other advantage than that which is given them by age. That, which their years give them, is experience, and experience recommends to favour and respect. As to the rich, who have slaves and cattle of their own, they

are not considered as forming another class. That they have advantages, however, there is no doubt; but then these advantages are the immediate consequences of their wealth, and not of any extraordinary right; for, in the first place, they are not exempt from the pillage, but escape being sold by having it in their power to furnish a ransom slave. They afe again amenable to all the same laws as the rest, but sometimes escape their decrees in consequence of their ability to compound in the same manner. These are the only distinctions which are to be made with respect to those, who may be denominated the people of Cayor, Sin and Sallum.

The slaves in these countries, who form the fourth rank of society, are very few. There is here and there a person who may have from five to ten, and perhaps another, who may have from ten to fifty of them. But there are but very few, who are rich, and of course but very few slaves. The slaves do not bear the proportion of more than one to fifteen hundred, if compared with the people. It was calculated by the best census, which General Boufflers and Monsieur de Villeneuve could make, that there were fifteen hundred thousand persons in Cayor, and about a thousand slaves.

The slaves, small as their number is, are of two classes, namely, either such as have once known freedom, but have lost it in consequence of the pillage, or of being pronounced guilty of real or imputed crimes, or such as are slaves by birth.

To whichever of these classes they belong, they are allowed to marry, and to chuse their own wives. A slave in one family may, by the master's consent, marry one in another. In this case, the two do not dwell together, but see each other at times. A slave has often, like the master, more than one wife. The same law, which attaches to the wife of a freeman, in the case of adultery, attaches also to the wife of a slave; that is, she is sold; and is sure of being passed into the hands of the Europeans, because, having no property, she cannot ransom herself by paying a price equivalent to her own value. It happens, also, that the proprietor of a slave has occasionally a son or a relation pillaged in the night. In such case he makes a sacrifice of the former for the redemption of such relation or son. Except in such extraordinary cases as these, it may be set down as an established rule in this country, that a person born in slavery, whether descended from persons pillaged or convicted of crimes, or from persons themselves born slaves, are never sold.

The occupations of the slaves may be divided into domestic and agricultural: The men, in the former case, do out of doors work, collect and bring in wood, and fetch water. The women pound millet, spin cotton, and do other things in the household-way. In the latter case the men cultivate the ground. They begin their labour at about five in the morn ing, and leave off at about eleven for the whole day they seldom, if ever, work afterwards, except in harvest, so that their labour is not more than the ordinary exercise which men should take. The women slaves do little more than gather cotton at the proper season of the year, in which they are sometimes assisted, but not often, by the men. In short, both the men and the women-slaves pass whole days together and do little or nothing: In respect to the mode or fatigue of their labour when employed, there is no distinction between the master and the slave. There are very few people, as I have observed before, who have any slaves at all; and they who have any, work in general with them in the field; nor can any one discover the difference of their situation from the difference of their employments. As to whips, chains, or any other instrument of torture for slaves in these countries, they are totally unknown.

The food which is given to the slaves, consists of millet, milk, fish and flesh, but of the latter little, except what may have been collected from the chace; for meat is not much used by any description of people whatever in these countries. But here also, as in the former case, we find slavery less a distinction in reality than in the name; for they eat in company with the children of their masters, and partake of the same repast. It may not be improper to observe here, that they sometimes live in the same house, and sleep in the

same room.

Having now spoken of the four different orders, of the king, the blood royal, the people, and their respective slaves, I come to a new topic; to the religion, which any of these may profess.

The religion of these countries, if we except the two Serreres, who, on account of their wild state, are considered as having no religion at all, is Mahometanism. There are whole villages inhabited by the priests of Mahomet and their relations, and by these alone. These priests in their own tongue, are called Serims, but Marabous by the French. The villages which contain them, and which I have distin

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guished by the name of sacerdotal, have the privilege of never being molested by the pillage. It may happen, however, that a Serim may be in another village when the pillage is executed, and, if so, it will be difficult for him to escape being sold with the rest. In these villages the Serims perform their worship every day.

At Dakard there are three mosques, the one open and the other thatched, for the performance of the religion of Mahomet. To the open one the Serims in the neighbourhood repair, and worship as a body, falling prostrate in one uniform position on the ground, and continuing stedfast and immoveable in it during the time of prayer. Among these Serims there is no head. There is no other distinction among them than that which superior knowledge may create, and this is superior respect. As for the bulk of the people, they seldom, if ever assemble, except for circumcision. They know little about the religion of the country, and, a few external rites excepted, are little of Mahometans but by ALFRED.

name.

[To be continued.]

On the early Attempts of the Moravians to Civilize the North American Indians.

THE religious society called Moravians or United Brethren, has distinguished itself by its benevolent attempts to diffuse the blessings of civilization among the most forlorn and neglected of our species in all parts of the world. They date their establishment as a distinct religious sect, at a very remote period. They appear to agree with the Church of England in their principal religious ceremonies, though they scruple to take an oath, object to war, and have a peculiar system of church discipline; their history abounds with instances of much patient suffering, especially about the period of the reformation; their principal settlements were in Germany, but religious intolerance drove them from place to place until a considerable body found an asylum at Herrnhut in Moravia; hence they have sometimes been called Herrnbuters; one of their principal leaders at this station was Count Zinzendorf, a nobleman of high rank and education, who devoted his time and fortune to promote the christian religion; he commonly delivered two or three religious

discourses in a day, notwithstanding his varied and extensive avocations; and it is worthy of remark, that although the number of proselytes to this sect has been very great, much caution is exercised in the admission of members, and to this circumstance may perhaps be attributed in part, the respectable character of these amiable people; every candidate for membership must pass a certain time as a probationer; and if any of their members lapse into immorality, they are excluded until they exhibit signs of repentance. A people so studious as the Moravians are to preserve a consistency in their conduct with the principles they professed were particularly well adapted to carry the glad tidings of the Gospel into heathen lands, and accordingly we find they have been signally successful; they wisely inculcated it as a duty incumbent upon every individual to labour for his own support, and that of his family; hence they were inured to industry themselves, and qualified to prove its advantages to others. The temporal improvement of the people they visited, became an important object with them: hence the Moravian missionaries are generally skilled in those mechanical arts, which more immediately conduce to the subsistence and comfort of man. The ardour of these people, their sufferings and their success, we believe have never been exceeded by any body of Christians. They have laboured in the distant east, on the coast of Coromandel, in the Nicobar islands, in Abyssinia, Persia and Egypt; their success has been great among the Greenlanders, on the coast of Labrador, in the Danish West India islands, in the English island of Antigua, and among the North American Indians; they have also attempted to convert the Tartars, and have succeeded to a considerable extent with the Hottentots in the neighbourhood of the Cape of Good Hope. By their steady perseverance upwards of twenty three thousand of the most destitute of mankind in different regions of the earth, have been converted to christianity and made acquainted with some of the most useful arts of civilized life. The privations these missionaries have suffered upon different occasions, seems scarcely credible: as an instance of their zeal, two of them were exceedingly desirous of selling themselves as slaves that they might have an opportunity of converting the negroes at St. Thomas's. They supposed that a teacher, by becoming himself a slave, might be always among them, and hence able to give them uninterrupted instruction: on being informed that no white persons could according to law be admitted as slaves, they purposed to work at a trade for a

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