staff about five feet high, surrounded by eight bent spear heads; this was called a tokoi, at the foot of it was a hole about three inches in diameter, down which the Ju-Ju priests would pour libations of tombo or palm wine, as a sacrifice to the Ju-Ju. I was informed that this Ju-Ju house was built over the grave of the original founder of Obulambri town. Behind the tokoi, on a kind of altar raised about eighteen inches from the ground, were displayed about a dozen human skulls; at the time I visited it the Ju-Ju man explained to me that the greater part of these had belonged to New Calabar prisoners taken in their last war with those people; besides the skulls were sundry odds and ends of native pottery, as also a few bowls and jugs of European manufacture. What part this pottery played in their devotions I could never get a Ju-Ju man to explain, some of them appeared to have held human blood. Stacked up in one corner were a few human bones, principally thigh and shin bones.
The Brassmen do not often sacrifice human beings to their Ju-Jus, except in time of war, when all prisoners without exception were sacrificed.
Their Ju-Ju snake occasionally secured a small child by crawling unobserved into a house when the elders were absent or asleep. I once was passing through a small fishing village in the St. Nicholas river, when most of the inhabitants were away fishing, and hearing terrible screams went to see what was the cause of the trouble, and found several women wringing their hands and running to and fro in front of a small hut. For several minutes I could not get them to tell me what was the cause of their trouble; at last one of them trembling, with the most abject fear and quite unable to speak, pointed to the door of the hut. I
