if he did not produce a sum of money by a certain time, and he was intensely afraid of him. Natives often paid, and still pay, enormous sums of money, as much as 20,000 or 30,000 cowrie shells, for a charm to hang on their necks to protect them against spirits and disease. In some parts of the country the idea is prevalent that European missionaries have the power of bewitching people, and I was told by a chief, only in 1902, that whenever a missionary or a teacher came into the village, the cry went round, ‘Lay in a stock of water. The European is coming to put medicine into the well to change our hearts and to make us read his religion.’ For a long time people thought that the missionary drank their children's blood and ate the heart out of their dead chiefs. In one instance a missionary consented to have a building erected over the tomb of a big chief, close to the church, to prove to the people that he had
