Scene Two: A hut in Central Africa.

[Sidenote: A heathen home in Africa.]

Soon after sunrise a number of women and girls, laden with hoes, baskets, and babies, start out from the grass hut which is home to them, and make their way to the field to work all day in the hot sun. Having leisurely smoked his pipe in preparation for the day’s labors, the man of the house starts with sons and neighbors on a hunting expedition, or goes to a neighboring town to exchange his stock for some coveted article. Towards evening all is bustle and confusion about the home, as the women have returned and are preparing the evening meal. All goes merrily, for here comes the head of the house in an excellent humor. Picking up the nearest baby, he fondles it and says, “A man in the next town has just bought this baby of me as wife for his son. Being strong and fat and lusty, she has brought a good price.” Whereupon a small brother shouts with delight, for this means that the dowry for _his_ wife is provided and the girl on whom he has set his affections can be procured without further delay. His mother is pleased,--the prospect adds to her importance,--but the seventeen year old mother of the fat, cooing baby turns away to hide her face and surreptitiously to hug her two other children. “Anyway, they are boys; _they_ cannot be taken from me.”

The boy who is to profit by the sale of his little sister is not suited with his evening meal, and, catching a chicken, he cuts off one leg and demands that it be cooked for him. No thought of the suffering fowl interferes with his appetite, any more than of the little sister so soon to be sent out on the forest trail, her little brown body carefully oiled, to be subjected to the blows and ill-treatment of an unknown mother-in-law. But even before the little one goes, she has learned her life lessons,--that a lie is a crime only if it is discovered,--that if she does not like her husband she may console herself with some other man so long as she is not found out. And, after all, the relation may be of short duration, for, if her future husband is unkind, one of his wives will surely be an adept in the art of poisoning, and then all of them will be inherited by his brother. And so the little brown baby, fondled, petted, spoiled today, is sent out tomorrow with foul words on her tongue and foul thoughts in her heart, to be a wife and the future mother of little brown babies whose possibilities are infinite, whose opportunities are to be,--what?

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