I shall not forget you, for you gave me this," and he pointed to a big white scar upon his shoulder.

"You would have killed me, but the stuff in that iron tube of yours burned slowly when you held the fire to it, so that I had time to jump aside and the iron ball did not strike me in the heart as you meant that it should.

Yet, it is still here; oh! yes, I carry it with me to this day, and now that I have grown thin I can feel it with my finger." I listened astonished to this harangue, which if it meant anything, meant that we had all met before, in Africa at some time when men used matchlocks that were fired with a fuse--that is to say, about the year 1700, or earlier.

Reflection, however, showed me the interpretation of this nonsense.

Obviously this old priest's forefather, or, if one put him at a hundred and twenty years of age, and I am sure that he was not a day less, perhaps his father, as a young man, was mixed up with some of the first Europeans who penetrated to the interior of Africa.
Probably these were Portuguese, of whom one may have been a priest and the other two an elderly man and his son, or young brother, or companion.