Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE STORY OF THE LION AND MR. HUNGER. FIND under the date of April ist, 1888, the following remark in my journal:
All this (Sunday) morning we have been trying our hands at soap making, and by midday managed to make quite a decent amount, and are all very proud of the result. For months we had been without soap, and the only way we had of washing our clothes at all was to boil them in a big native-made earthenware jar. We only had the clothes we stood in, so that while our servants were boiling them we had to wrap ourselves in blankets and sit in our huts or tents until they were ready for us to put on again. The night before, being Saturday night, a cow had been killed and the meat divided among the men as a treat for their Sunday dinner. We had taken most of the fat, and with it proposed to make soap. We were novices in the art of soap-making, but, as you all know,
necessity is the mother of invention, and so we invented as we went on. Fat or oil, we knew, was the chief ingredient, and that the next thing was to obtain potash and soda. We cudgelled our brains as to how we could obtain soda. We had observed that when we burnt a certain kind of tree it yielded a very white ash, so we mixed this with water and used it as a wash for whitewashing the walls of our mud houses. Well, one thing led to another. One morning some of us noticed that if this whitewash was left standing all night the ash sank to the bottom, leaving the water a clear yellowish colour. This water had an acrid, bitter taste, which we knew must contain a certain amount of soda, and so, by a mere chance we discovered this method of making soap. To return to my story. On this particular Sunday morning we collected all the fat, mixed it with a quantity of the ash-water, and po…
