Sir H. M. Stanley, the famous African explorer, once had a strange and unpleasant experience, from which he was saved by his presence of mind and readiness of resource. He was travelling in Africa, and had to stay some time at a village. The people here were extremely ignorant and superstitious and quite unused to the ways of white men. After a time some of them noticed him making entries in his note book—for this was new country to him, and it was important that he should remember what he saw—and not understanding what he was doing they jumped to the conclusion that he was bewitching them in some mysterious way. This report spread all over the village, and a crowd of about five hundred savages collected, and threatened to kill the explorer at once unless he destroyed the book. Stanley was, naturally, very unwilling to give up all the notes which had cost him so much trouble and danger to collect, but on the other hand it would be very much worse to lose his life. Suddenly he had a bright idea. He happened to have with him a volume of Shakespeare's plays: he thought that in all probability the savages would not know one book from another, so he offered it to them instead of his note-book. The natives were quite taken in. They accepted the Shakespeare, and, amid much rejoicing, burnt it to ashes, thus breaking, as they thought, the spell that Stanley had cast upon them.