was bruised, and his skull almost fractured, by the vain efforts he had made to release himself. Soon after Mr. Smith's arrival, he became to a certain degree sensible, asked for Mr. Coffin's gun, with which he had seen him shoot a few days before, and on seeing it became more composed, eat a few dates which were offered him, and begged his surrounding companions to take care of the money tied up in his cloth and give it to his master, telling them "to divide his clothes among themselves." He then called for something to drink, but before it could be brought expired in a violent convulsion.
These are the fevers which so often attack strangers who come down from the interior, and which produce in the minds of the Abyssinians that great dread and horror of the coast which they generally entertain. After death the body was carefully washed, sewed up in a new sheet, which I had sent for the purpose, and decently buried in a spot of ground allotted to the Abyssinians for that purpose. So far indeed did the Mahomedans lay aside their bigotry on this occasion, that two of the Nayib's own people were appointed to superintend the funeral. To secure the grave from the hyænas a trough was first dug, resembling a common grave, on one side of which a kind of shelving vault was excavated, which, as soon as the body was deposited in it, was closed in with thorny branches and heavy stones, and afterwards the first opening was filled with solid earth. The Abyssinian priest who came down with the party, recited the psalms and prayers appointed for such occasions, which are much the same as those used by our own church, and Mr. Smith particularly observed the ceremony of throwing a portion of earth into the grave, when they came to the last solemn farewell, "we here commit his body to the ground, dust to dust and ashes to ashes, in hopes of a joyful resurrection," which seemed to make a strong impression on all who were present. I may be permitted to observe, in this place, that the attention paid to this poor boy gained us not only the good will of the Christians from Abyssinia, but the respect of all the higher classes of Mahomedans. The latter are, in general perhaps, more observant of religious rites than Europeans,
