Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

272 THINKING BLACK
us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be." As
not even a bone of Christ's body was broken, how sug-
gestive the fate of both His robe of cloth and robe of flesh !
But there is a glimmer in all this gloom. In the
darkest den of Africa, the doctrine of the Immortality
of the Soul is flaming like a fire, and the deeper you
dig the higher it flares. Bipeds only, too, the door being
slammed on quadrupeds. Bird or beast, do not dare
suggest to the Luban that animals are immortal. Here is
a whole town actually gone ofi" its food and solidly refusing
to eat until nem, con. they come to a decision on a ques-
tion of—of metaphysics. 'Tis passing strange. When
I came on the scene they had been at it for four hours,
the debate a wild thing : Has
a dog a spirit ?
The judges were in the blues when I arrived, and in-
sisted on my umpiring their hard-mouthed wrangle. The
older folks stamp with indignation at the insolent idea,
and the Freethinker who set this ball a-rolling is having
it hot, the heretic ! At last they have nonplussed him, for
he lamely confesses that, of course, dogs as a rule are
well—only dogs, a species of local canine mutton, that is
to say, but this dreadful dog was—w-a-s, a wonder. The
whole debate, it seems, masks the mouth of a trap, a
lawyer's trap, and a law-suit is lurking in the background
all the time. For if he can successfully insinuate that an
exceptional dog may (ahem !) exceptionally have a spirit,
then he is going to have the law on them, for he avers a
dead dog is haunting him to his undoing. This dog, be
it keenly noted, was not only a hunter's dog but really a