This Promise
Might Probably Be Fulfilled Six Blessed Hours From The Time When
It Was Made; But I Thought To
Myself, every place in Uganda is
alike when there is no company at home, and so I resolved to sit
The time out, like Patience on a monument, hoping something funny
might turn up after all.
At last her majesty stumps out, squats behind my red blanket,
which is converted into a permanent screen, and says hastily, or
rather testily, "Can't Bana perceive the angry state of the
weather? - clouds flying about, and the wind blowing half a gale?
Whenever that is the case, I cannot venture out." Taking her lie
without an answer, I said, I had now been fifty days or so doing
nothing in Uganda - not one single visitor of my own rank ever
came near me, and I could not associated with people far below
her condition and mine - in fact, all I had to amuse me at home
now was watching a hen lay her eggs upon my spare bed. Her
majesty became genial, as she had been before, and promised to
provide me with suitable society. I then told her I had desired
my officers several times to ask the king how marriages were
conducted in this country, as they appeared so different from
ours, but they always said they dared not put such a question to
him, and now I hoped she would explain it to me. To tell her I
could not get anything from the king, I knew would be the surest
way of eliciting what I wanted from her, because of the jealousy
between the two courts; and in this instance it was fully proved,
for she brightened up at once, and, when I got her to understand
something of what I meant by a marriage ceremony, in high good
humour entered on a long explanation, to the following effect:
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