of country where there were several villages. At one of these high festival was evidently being held, a dance of women was taking place in the main street, the usual wriggle and stamp affair, to the thump, thump, thump of the native drums. Before one house, on either side of the doorway, stood a man and a woman. The remarkable point about the affair was that their legs were painted white, and as the view of them was not interrupted by clothes, the effect was somewhat startling. "Dear me, Mr.———," I said, "that's rather quaint." "We've some very peculiar customs down here regarding twins," said he, before I, being unprepared, had time to turn the conversation.
These customs (Akele) amounted to the mother of twins being kept in her hut for a year after the birth. Then there was a great dance and certain ceremonies, during which the lady and the doctor, not the husband, had their legs painted white. When the ceremonials were over the woman returned to her ordinary avocations.
There is always a sense of there being something uncanny regarding twins in West Africa, and in those tribes where they are not killed they are regarded as requiring great care to prevent them from dying on their own account. I remember once among the Tschwi trying to amuse a sickly child with an image which was near it and which I thought was its doll. The child regarded me with its great melancholy eyes pityingly, as much as to say, "A pretty fool you are making of yourself," and so I was, for I found out that the image was not a doll at all but an image of the child's dead twin which was being kept near it as a habitation for the deceased twin's soul, so that it might not have to wander about, and, feeling lonely, call its companion after it.
The terror with which twins are regarded in the Niger Delta is exceedingly strange and real. When I had the honour of being with Miss Slessor at Okyon, the first twins in that district were saved with their mother from immolation owing entirely to Miss Slessor's great influence with the natives and her own unbounded courage and energy. The mother in this case was a slave woman—an Eboe, the most expensive and valuable of slaves. She was the property of a
