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246 DICK SANDS, THE BOY CAPTAIN. and Kazunde were the chîef centres. Thîs was the country in which Dick Sands now found himself, a hundred miles from sliore, in charge of a lady exhausted wîth fatigue and anxiety, a half-dying child, and a band of negroes who would be a most tempting baît to the slave-driver. His last illusion was completely dîspelled. He had no longer the faintest hope that he was in America, that land where little was to be dreaded from either native, wild beast, or climatc ; he could no more cherish the fond impression that he might be in the plcasant région between the Cordilleras and the coast, where villages are numerous and missions afford hospitable shelter to every traveller. Far, far away were those provinces of Bolivia and Peru, to which (unless a criminal hand had interposed) the " Pilgrim " would certainly hâve sped her way. No : too truly this was the terrible province of Angola ; and worse than ail, not the district near the coast, under the surveillance of the Portuguese authorities, but the interior of the country, traversed only by slave caravans, driven under the lash of the havildars. Limited, in one scnsc, was the knowledgc that Dick Sands posscssed of this land of horrors ; but he had read the accounts that had bcen gîven by the mîssionaries of the sixtecnth and seventeenth centuries, by the Portuguese traders who frequented the route from St. Paul de Loanda, by San Salvador to the Zaïre, as well as by Dr. Livingstone in his travels in 1853, and consequently he kncw enoughto awaken immédiate and complète despair in any spirit less indomitable than his own. Anyhow, his position was truly appalling.