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Extraordinary Instances of Honour: Cudjoe

The relations and friends , transported with sudden rage, ran to the house of Cudjoe, to take revenge by killing Murray.

Cudjoe stopped them at the door, and demanded what they wanted. "The white men ," said they, our brothers and sons, and we will kill all white men. " have carried away us the white man you have in your house, for we will kill him." the white man you have in your house, for we will kill him." Give 66 Nay," said Cudjoe, "the white men that carried away your relations are bad men, kill them when you can take them; but this white man is a good man, and you must not kill him."— "But he is a white man ," they cried, " and the white men are all bad men, we will kill them all."-" Nay," says he, " must not kill a man that has done no harm, only for being white. This man is my friend , my house is his post, I am his soldier, and must fight for him; you must kill me before you can kill him. What good man will ever come again under my roof, if I let my floor be stained with a good man's blood?"

The negroes, seeing his resolution, and being convinced by his discourse that they were wrong, went away ashamed. In a few days Murray went abroad again with his friend Cudjoe,. when several of them took him by the hand, and told him,. "they were glad they had not killed him; for, as he was a good man, their god would have been very angry, and would have spoiled their fishir.g."

As it is our intention to record whatever we meet with, that is curious or wonderful, we hesitate not in inserting the following SURPRISING EFFECTS OF ANGER Physicians and naturalists afford instances of very extraordinary effects of this passion. Borrichius cured a woman of an inveterate tertian ague, which had baffled the art of physic, by putting the patient in a furious fit of anger. Valeriola made use of the same means, with the like success, in a quartan ague. The same passion has been equally salutary to paralytic, gouty, and even dumb persons; to which last it has sometimes given the use of speech. Etmuller gives divers instances of very singular cures wrought by anger; among others, he mentions a person laid up in the gout, who, being provoked by his physician, flew upon him, and was cured. Itis true, the remedy is somewhat dangerous in the application, when a patient does not know how to use it with moderation. We meet with several instances of princes, to whom it has proved mortal; e. g. Valentinian I. Wenceslaus, Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary, and others. There are also instances wherein it has produced the epilepsy, jaundice, cholera morbus, diarrhea, &c. In fact, this passion is of such a nature, that it quickly throws the whole nervous system into preternatural commotions, by a violent stricture of the nervous and muscular parts; and surprisingly augments, not only the systole of the heart, and its contiguous vessels, but also the tone of the fibrous parts in the whole body. It is also certain, that this passion, by the spasmodic stricture it produces in the parts, exerts its power principally on the stomach and intestines, which are highly nervous and membraneous parts; whence the symptoms are more dangerous, in proportion to the greater consent of the stomach and intestines with the other nervous parts, and almost with the whole body. The unhappy influence of anger likewise on the biliary and hepatic ducts, is very surprising; since, by an intense constriction of these, the liver is not only rendered scirrhous, but stones also are often generated in the gall-bladder and biliary ducts: these accidents have scarcely any other origin than an obstruction of the free motion and efflux of the bile, by means of this violent stricture. From such a stricture, likewise, proceeds the jaundice, which, in process of time, lays a foundation for calculous concretions in the gall-bladder. By increasing the motion of the fluid, or the spasms of the fibrous parts, by means of anger, a large quantity of blood is forcibly propelled to certain parts; whence it happens, that they are too much distended, and the orifices of the veins distributed there, opened. It is evident, from experience, that anger has a great tendency

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