Part Four — The Harvest Mail

Part Four THE HARVEST MAIL Lolodorf, February 5, 1910. My dears, I write you at my old table, on the very same cracks. There against the wall is my little old fat chest of drawers, that still thrills me with a sense of actual opulence be- yond any piece of furniture in the world. Last night, when I came into this room, I seemed to find myself and you, as I had found so many friends along the way, and happiness. February 8. You are to know about the journey hither from the beach. On Wednesday morning I left Batanga with two loads, and at Kribi I met Mameya and a man of the Mvele tribe with the Lehmans' jinricksha. The jinricksha is like a small dogcart, and under the hood of it I jogged along for four days, along a perfect high- way between two painted forests; and all the old things were seen to have passed away. Mameya's little strong body trotted in the shafts; Nkot pushed behind; myself, I lounged on the seat and pondered with a kind of degen- erate homesickness on the past. Where were the seven deaths to be met in the old way? Where were the swamps under their fathoms of green, and the hills which one climbed on one's face, and the perilous river crossings? All the sense of sweet intimacy with the forest has gone with the trail, and out of the terrific tumult of the building of the road runs this immaculate highway quiet in the sun. When I think of the uproar of the days and the outraged earth and the great cries of the falling trees and the enforced efforts of the forest tribes among the debris, I feel some lack of zest in the journey on the complacent highway. Yet it is a wonderful road and most creditable to those white men who camped along it. I suppose that they are well out of this by now, travailing in other forests, and glad not to have to live "on top of the paths" they have com- pleted. I had a most comfortable journey, though Mameya did pull in at night to miserable towns; because he had relatives among the townspeo- ple, I suppose, and I don't know the towns on top of this new road. But we did very well. I was happy with my hands between my knees all the idle day. I had a grass mat that I would spread out on the road or in a palaver house, and sitting on this, I would drink hot tea out of my thermos bottle, and the carrier would give me a piece of smoking yam on a little pointed stick. I did not take my tent, but slept in little bark houses. Only the long divide of Pikiliki was familiar. There the river talks the very same palaver among the rocks and the forest drops peace upon the highway, and there I had to walk. It is easy to talk about the path, but when I think of telling you about the people, I can't begin. So many Christians greeted me on the highway. It did n't use to be so at all. But now I can't make any sort of time on a journey for friendly greetings, and for little gatherings of townspeople who call me to speak in the houses which they have built for God, little houses where they sit on logs and are immensely happy. I spoke in lots of such places, and lots of times I sat in my dogcart by the roadside and talked to the people. Once I was walking and in the shade of a tree I met a woman. She was a Chris- tian, she told me, and held my hand and beamed upon me in a particular way they have. Pres- ently she undid her head-covering, and out of the puffs of her hair she took a little coin — five pfennig — and this she gave me. I was 207 . astonished, — at the money and at the spirit, — but I tried to be polite and to know just how to accept her five pfennig. I was surprised, too, by the emotion with which my friends met me, trembling and with tears. At Lam, where a church has just been organized, Bian and Nshicko and old Mejio laughed and cried and held my hands. "We see your face again. Ah, Missa Makingia, this long time that we have parted, always we have prayed that we might see your face again. And God is willing. Did you forget us? Did you re- member us? Do you remember how you said to us thus and so?" They put me in Bian's little clean brown house and there was to be no part- ing from me, they said, all that day. Still, it was allowed that Makingia had to bathe. We had meetings, one in the church and one in the palaver house in the evening, by the wood fires. Lam is a big center now; five hun- dred come to the service of a Sunday. The church was organized perhaps a month ago, and it is curious to see how deeply mystical a sense of the fact of the Church in their midst the older Christians have. We gabbled a great deal all the sunny afternoon, and after the night came in among the palm trees in the village street. We were beautifully happy. After we said good-night I heard Bian and Nshicko laugh- ing together under the eaves of the house, and when I asked why, they said they rejoiced be- cause of some "arguments" I had made in the meeting. I arrived at Lolodorf at the end of a golden day. Mrs. Lehman met me about an hour out, and a little later down the road came those of the schoolboys who knew me, capering with flags; and some of them are young men that were little boys, and those that are still little boys are younger brothers! It was sweet to see them and I was happy. Bitum was quite silly with pleasure. He was sure that my men were going to spill me out of the cart, and he shouted staccato directions as he ran in front of the jinricksha, where he had to be nimble or perish. Lolodorf has changed almost beyond recog- nition. But the house is the same and the Leh- mans are the same, and I could not sleep the first night for old familiar thoughts that came upon me in my old room. February 14. I got here Saturday, as you ought to know if you read this serial with proper attention. And Sunday was very exciting. So many people came to church, and there is an addition on the new church. The people built this church themselves — a huge roof over rows and rows of seats, and before the Lam church was organ- ized there would sometimes be sixteen hundred people at service of a Sunday morning. Now there are services held in so many directions that the audiences here are smaller. The morning after I came there were over seven hundred, and that day there was an ordination of elders. When I saw all those peo- ple, and so many of them my friends, — and when I saw two friends of mine (whom I taught to read) and another, stand to be or- dained, and presently kneel on a bit of grass mat, — I wept from sheer enlargement of heart. To-day Mrs. Lehman and I were in a town where often I used to go to see a woman who is a Christian now, a tall woman furiously tat- tooed. I always loved her, and now, when I sit in her house and think, "This little brown house is the house of a Christian woman, and that is Nkata," I feel the uses of the years. She came in from her work, — cutting brush she had been, — and her body with its terrific mesh of bluish-black tattoo was wet with the dew. Mrs. Lehman was telling her that her little daughter, who is to be graduated with Mrs. Emerson's advanced class of girls, must 2IO learn now from her mother the works of women — gardening and fishing and hunting of fire- wood and cooking. But Nkata, it seems, has the old golden maternal dream for her one little daughter. She unwound her bit of rag from a cut on her leg, — the scars of her profession, — and she said that Mban must not work as her mother does. The humanity of this was, of course, very touching, but we called up the shade of a future husband, who, for all his lack of definite feature, knew his own mind and how to drive little Mban to her duty, without any particular care of her shins. February 16. Out under the bright moon and bright Sirius and the worshipful Canopus, I have been talk- ing with the boys the old palavers. After all these years — is the world really round as the white people say? They do not doubt, say they, but they wonder! And beyond the stars, what? Ah, what, indeed! February 24. I am here for a rest, which I was popularly supposed to need after the tearing-up at Baraka. In a day or two I leave for Efulen, where I am to work. Certainly I have rejoiced in my rest and in the companionship of all my old cronies. Yesterday I spent in the neighborhood of the old site, and I tell you that Antaeus did not know the only trick, for I, being clasped to many brown bosoms, was remade as good as new. You know better than I do the statistics of the work here. But actually to see the symbol of numbers translated into life, with the face of a man you know, of hundreds of men you know, who once were afar off and now are truly of the tribe of God, as you know yourself to be, — this is very wonderful and very moving. All these years to have been praying, perhaps me- chanically, "Thy Kingdom come," and then one day to see it coming, crowding up an old path that has been made straight and the way of the Lord! Efulen, March 4. I must tell you about my journey over from Lolodorf. It was a good journey. Dr. Lehman came with me to see the dentist, for Dr. Weber does us the great kindness of caring for our teeth. On Monday we left the jinricksha and struck off to the south for Efulen. I was in a hammock again for the first time these three years. Sometimes we stopped to eat — you can bank on that in my caravan. A grass mat spread in the shade, a little kettle boiling on a friendly woman's fire, a cup of coffee and a loaf of bread, and now and again an egg. We bought eggs as we went. When we bought our first one the carriers asked me who would eat the egg, since we were two. "The woman will eat the egg," said I, "for such is the fashion of our tribe." Next we bought two more. And how were the eggs to be divided, asked the carriers, since the eggs were now three? "The fashion of our tribe is," said I, "that when there is but one egg the woman shall eat it, but of three eggs the man eats two." This amused them, and me, very much. At something after four we went into real forest, and so in the cool of the evening climbed a great divide. Pretty stiff work. The sun had set when we came up into the town of Nkole Miel. Water from the spring, a fire in the street by the hut where I slept, a good little supper, and then the lovely, lovely night, with the moon golden among the trees at the end of the clearing, and Canopus and the Dog Star, how bright above the little brown huts! We climbed into Efulen at one o'clock next day. There can be no two minds about Efulen, as there might be about a beautiful woman. Efulen is amazingly beautiful. The brown bark houses of this station, with their shaggy leaf thatch, are on the top of an abrupt hill. This hill looks every way upon neighbor hills, and beyond these to others fainter and dimmer. The broken surges of the mountains here and there thrust the forest out of the level into the light of day. The green cover of the country is broken by terraced ranks of white trunks — great pillars with high crowns of foliage. In the mists, in the late and early lights, there is a magic everywhere like Turner's magic. And imagine this: there is not an hour of the day when there is a break in all this beauty. The top of the hill is small; the rise is sharp; one might sit on the edge of the clearing and dangle one's feet in the tops of the trees — almost. From a missionary point of view Efulen is exciting. It is very nice for you that your mis- sionary has been appointed to a station of which you may believe happy reports and of which she may speak without fear of exaggeration. There is here a great temptation to write in numbers, for the numbers come, and it is very moving to the missionaries to take count of, and to cherish, the sum of these poor bodies who come in from the thousand hills of a Saturday afternoon, — their babies and their food upon their backs, — who camp in the near towns or in the station guest-house, and who are sitting in church of a Sunday morning two hours before the time. To us they are so real, so differentiated, so im- mensely worth while, and we want so much to express their reality and their worth to out-of- the-way people like yourselves, that we cast about for some sort of symbol that will carry, and we hit upon numbers. We hope, when we say that fourteen hundred people were in church to-day, that we have given you some sort of sense of what really happened. But the aspect of that forest people and the murmur that goes up from them, and the trouble of heart with which the minister looks at them, and the joy with which he looks at them, and the flooding of the hill with the tide of them un- til all the crannies in the missionary's personal privacy brim with them, — we can't think that numbers will give you a sense of this; and you might be much oppressed if they did. March 7. Ten women sit on the floor of my little room. We have come in from a meeting where we learned to say: "Behold me, I am a woman, Thy servant. Do with me as Thou hast said." We said this a thousand times over and over, and at the last we rejoiced in it. "It is a good word/' we said, "and help is in it." When the white woman supposed the meeting to be at an end, an old soloist took the stage and I tell you she made a hit. A middle-aged woman she was, with a white crash towel about her head and a bit of blue cloth about her loins; for ornament a safety pin hung at her neck. She spoke — and with more passion than I can tell you — of the oppression of women. She was a very finished speaker and she had a telling theme. As she spoke, one woman and another and many of those who listened rose and embraced her, with beautiful gestures and deep sighs, and presently staccato ejaculations, and then an uproar of common complaint. About that time, in any civilized country, some of us would have been run in; as it was, the white women broke up the meeting. The women on the floor recount that I dress my own hair. I am, I overhear, of a peculiar cleverness. You should be glad of this. March 22. I am going about the big Bulu towns, among the magnetic Bulu women, the big strapping Bulu women that seem never too tired to go fishing, though they may have come in with firewood or from a long morning in a far garden. This is fishing season ; to fish properly you must hang a little basket down one side of your face, — a basket like a pint pot, — and the fish that you bring up with your net you put in this bas- ket, and there you keep it very well until you have enough little silver fish to make a little stew for your family, when you come up out of the river, hang your net by its withy rim to your shoulder, with which Amazonian trapping — for the net is like a shield — and with the river water still bright on your Amazonian legs, you make for home. I like it here better and better. And better than any other station in Africa so far. I like my comrades — Dr. and Mrs. Weber, Mr. Heminger and Mr. Reis. We laugh a great deal and I grow fat. The Webers are due for fur- lough after mission meeting, and I can't imagine how they will make out to man this station in their absence; they will think that they can't leave me here with no other woman, because I am unmarried. March 30. I have scribbled a sickening lot of letters — debts of honor — and now must close this. I am sleepy and a little peevish, and all on ac- count of Halley's comet. Not that I have seen it. Listen to this foolishness! I told the school - boys that the first to call me to see a most pe- culiar star, of a kind all by itself and not belong- ing at all to the common tribe of stars, should have a sixpence. Before the dawn, — says the unaccountable white woman, — and in the month of April, the boys are to look for this star. Last night I could not sleep — wrote too many letters yesterday. The night wore on to morning before I slept. Before light there was a tapping at my door, and a boy voice, not very convincing, a rather timid voice, announced the star. "Is it a peculiar star?" groans your child from beneath the net. " Truly a peculiar star," says the herald, without enthusiasm. So I put my feet in slippers and my arms into whatever is handy and I go out to where the silly mournful bats are still whirring. Venus winks in the east. They say that planets do not wink — perhaps the temptation is seldom suffi- ciently strong. I tell you what I saw this morn- ing before the dawn, when the moon was shining behind the house and Venus in the east, too beautiful to be entirely proper, and winking. She was so beautiful that I could not kill the little boy; I told him to go away. But I asked Mr. Reis to announce this morning in school that no one need find any more stars for Miss Mackenzie, she would make her own astronomi- cal observations. Tell the children that I have a fine boy to care for me. His name is Obam, 11 Eagle." He is perhaps sixteen, with a strong body of a pleas- ant brown. A most awful giggler. Sometimes I think that I go to sleep to the sound of his giggle and wake up to it — perhaps that is the use of it, to wake me up. I asked him today, when he was scrubbing my floor, which work did he like best, to wash, iron, or scrub? He giggled, of course, sitting on his heels, and then he said, "Why, did he hate any work?" I really think that he does not, for he never wants to put it off, which I always do. When I go on the road he carries my bed and food. In the villages where we stay he sets up my cot and cooks my food, and he does not put on airs. Even on the road he giggles — which is almost incredible. April 8. There will be little time to write a letter be- cause the mail will have gone before Mrs. Weber and I shall have returned from our trip to Xkotoven. But I must tell you about the leop- ard. We hear of nothing else since Dr. Weber shot it. For several nights, since Sunday, per- haps, the leopard had been taking sheep from Nkole Si, the village just outside our boundary and more than halfway down the hill. On Wednesday night Dr. Weber set a trap made of net, with a gun set to go off when a bent sapling was released, — I can't explain what I don't understand. He left some slack in the cord attached to the trigger, as it was bound to rain, and he went to bed in a hut beside the trap. It did rain terrifically, but the slack was over- long; the leopard came and went unharmed. Thursday night he set the trap again, and went to bed in the hut. Mrs. Weber and I were left at home, of course. At midnight the gun went off. We heard it and the long echo of it among the hills. Silence, and then other reports — the doctor's rifle and a native gun, and then the cries of the people in the town. I got up. Past our house, from his, patters Mr. Reis with his lantern. I wonder — he is so quick — is he in his pajamas. Past patters Hemmie with his lantern. Presently down the hill patters your child with a lantern, and is followed by half the population of Nkpwa, who have come up over the hill. Much gabble by the way, but no dawdling. We turn off into the town of Nkole Si. The leopard is in the palaver house, and there, too, are all the heroes; the palaver house is packed with vociferous heroes. Even old Abota, too feeble to come to church, hangs to the skirt of this assemblage of heroes. Only a little boy out in the dark under the stars pro- claims himself a coward. " If I had met the leop- ard on the path," pipes he, high and happy, "I would have feared." "Would you, indeed?" say I. "I would, indeed," says he, "little me!" The leopard, poor beautiful creature, has nothing to say to his adversaries. He lies on the floor of the palaver house, and here is an end of all his "burning bright in the forests of the night." All the heroes maul him. They roll his fearful symmetry in the dust. From nose to tip of tail he measures eight feet. The doctor is in love with him ; Mr. Reis is in love with him; the very little coward out in the dark is so in love with him that he shrills the beauty and the terror of him to the stars. Because his whiskers are terribly potent, quite beyond your imagining, Mr. Reis is set to watch his whiskers most particularly, lest the heroes arm themselves with these and so be in a position to do away with their enemies. You were never yet struck by a leopard's whis- ker; besides, the white man is impervious to evil charms; so he mocks. Presently the leopard is tied to a sapling and we start up the hill by the light of lanterns and the Southern Cross and the Scorpion. Such gabblings yesterday over the distribu- tion of the meat. We know that a bit of the nose went to make hunting medicine, the which, if you pour it into the nostrils of your dog, does much sharpen his sense of smell. But the whis- kers are intact. The meat of leopard, they tell us, is very tender, and sure to establish the courage of the eater — food, you see, for heroes — and too potent for women and children. Too potent, say we, for the white man, and that is lucky too. Sunday, April 9. My dears, on Friday and Saturday before Communion, I was let help with some of the new confessors. I never had a hand in this be- fore, and it is a very exciting work. All those days were exciting. Seventeen hundred people were at the Communion service; and for days before, the Christians from a distance camped in the guest-house or visited in the towns. The church membership, culled out of the instructed and tried Christians, has come to be two hun- dred. The care of such a multitude is beyond our powers; the supernatural element in the enlightenment of this people is awfully percep- tible. Certain incidents witness to God's deal- ing with his own in spite of us. Not having kept pace with the work, I feel strange in it, and timid. April 17. Back from a trip to N6kt6ven — four days on the road, making about fifteen miles a day. A pleasant open path all the way and a very fair degree of comfort. Mrs. Weber went with me, so I had no chance to write you, my dears. She had the morning meetings and I the eve- ning. At Nkotoven they were disappointed that we did not stay longer. Zam6 is the angel of Nk6t6ven, the shepherdess of the poor silly sheep of that region, an old, wise shepherdess; none of your rococo ladies, but a shepherdess with a compelling crook. We were brought to her town by her importunate plea, and she was hoping that we would bark at her little flock, which at her instigation we did. "Aha!" nods old Zamo, sitting up in the village schoolhouse by Mrs. Weber, who is speaking — "Aha! Did n't I warn you of just this! And now it has come to pass. How you believe the voice of the white woman, silly sheep, — it is well that she speaks the words that old Zam6 has not wearied of telling you! Listen to this, will you, and be sure that you will hear these same arguments again! Old Zamo will be at you again when the white women are gone!" She put us up in her own house, where the rain leaked down on our faces where we lay on our two cots under the same net. The first night we slept at Alum; second night, Nkoto- ven; third night, Esen, and fourth night, Efulen. Obam, my boy, does very well on the road. What do you suppose we had for supper? White boiled rice and bread and butter! And a peanut porridge. And once some tinned grapes. I sure do know how to make myself comfortable on the road. A little teapot sings a little song of comfort on any old fire in any old palaver house; a rubber tub full of clean water makes all things new at the day's end. Only — how to carry bedding enough to keep me warm above and below on my cot, now that the rains are on. If it is not necessary to put me into school work, I shall find any amount of town work to do. There is an element of depression in this work — an hour in every day when one wonders however one comes to be batting around in such desolate places, a kind of homesick misgiving, very real and hard to bear. This poison never works on the road, but in the hut where one is to sleep and eat. All the other hours of the day are happy hours. April 21. Day before yesterday morning we started out for Biba bi nyan. I think we told a thou- sand people where we were going, and a thou- sand people told us that the path was bad. This proves that you cannot fool all the people all the time. "Where are you going?" "To Biba bi nyan." "Eke! The bad path!" We were walking — Obam, my boy, and another lad car- ried our loads. We turned off the highway three miles from the hill, and walked perhaps five miles in a path part forest and part sunny clear- ing, settled with small villages. At noon we struck off into the deep forest. We climbed for four hours, most of the time a stiff grade. Crawling around in the forest like that, one has very dim ideas of topography, even of direction. Part of the time we could hear a stream, — often we saw it, — a perfect beauty, quick and clear over a rocky bottom. Sometimes we crossed it on logs and sometimes the boys carried us over. It came back and back to the path and the path went up and up among the mossy rocks under the deep green gloom. Lovely country, but hard work. Late in the afternoon we came out on a level, and a few settlements. And from her town Abote came out to meet us, laughing and fluttering her lifted hands, as the Bulu do to a beloved guest. She is an old woman and good: a good old woman laughing with joy to see the white women in her little mountain town. We put up in her little hut — so tired I was that I kept stumbling over our boxes and our cots and the woman who was grinding peanuts for our supper. Mrs. Weber spoke that evening to the villagers in the old palaver house with the rain booming on the roof. By and by we found ourselves in bed. My old green cot is a friend. People laugh at it for a defect of its legs — but I don't laugh at it, I just go to bed on it. That is a great country for game — the mon- keys play of an early morning in the street of the village. People came in to see us before we were awake; they soon settled that. I had the morning meeting. And by eight o'clock we were off into the forest. Oh, my dears, some light rain of golden day filtered down into the dusk of that green descent, and the birds sang for Siegfried. We were out on the evil path by noon, forest-weary and forest-wise, — wise with that wordless wisdom that comes from actual physical grapple with the earth, and that makes you feel, so long as you keep the touch of it, so much better than your mere floor-walker. We came out of the forest perfect snobs — of a fashion. So we walked and we walked and we walked. By and by it rained — really, you know. We were in a stretch of forest, and then in a clearing. The rain came down the path in jumping torrents. Once the back of a snake showed itself in the river of the path and scared me. We kept on — there was nothing else to do. When we came out on the highway our thousand friends put their heads out of their huts to yell at us from under the streaming eaves, "It rains!" Quite so. "Where had we been?" " The bad path ! " We slapped, slapped, slapped on and up the hill to the house, where we drank hot lemonade and were glad of home. Still, even before I changed my wet clothes, I was glad of having gone. April 26. Yesterday I was resting through the noon hour in a house in As6k. I had spread my grass mat on a pole bed and was very comfortable and happy in the hot gloom of the little hut. A woman was pounding cassava paste in the wooden trough between her knees, her big pestle rising and falling like the dasher of a churn. Often she would stop to take breath. When all the cassava root was pounded to a smooth gray-white paste, she threw it out on a green mat of leaves. From this mass she took the handful which she moulded in a leaf to a roll and tied ever so deftly and laid by to be cooked when all her paste should be moulded and wrapped and tied into exactly similar green batons of perhaps eighteen inches long and an inch and a half in diameter. Her slim hands with the long narrow nails were very pretty, very quick. Soon she would be stacking her twenty batons in her black iron kettle, where the water would be shallow, and this she would cover with layers of plantain leaves tucked in to hold the steam. A big lift, a sigh, and the kettle would be on the fire in an end of the hut. I was watching all this steady deft business as I have done a thousand times, from the low bed of poles under the little loft at the other end of the hut. Nine little children, all absurdly of a size, all about five years old, were sitting on the floor in a row — a kind of little audience to the tableau of the white woman recumbent. A flicker of discreet murmur played along this line, and presently I began to take note of the sense of it. Said one. "I take the hat." Said another, 11 1 take the shoes." 14 1 take the dress." The book — the mat — the umbrella — even the poor thing's cherished hairs were all appro- priated by these little brigands. I laughed, and all the guilty nine quaked. In the afternoon I had a meeting. May 6. Binjim is the headman of the town at the foot of our hill, a mild-looking old man with deep eyes sunken in a withered face. He looks mild, but they say that he is subject to rages. When I pass his town I greet him; often we chat together. To-day as I pass he calls out, "Come in"; and I go in to where he lies in his palaver house looking down the street of his town — the street that is too sunny. " I suffer,' ' says the old man on his bed of poles, his old face very mild above his neck-ruff of dog teeth; " I suffer in my feet. Is your father well? " "He is well," say I. "Is your mother well?" "She is well, great thanks!" "You must tell them," says old Binjim, looking at me very kindly, "that an old man as old as this" — and he touches his white hair — "has made friends with you, has made with you a binding of friendship like this/1 — and he hooks his two forefingers together. "I will tell them," say I; "they will rejoice. They see the path long between their town and this." "Surely," says old Binjim, look- ing at me always very kindly. This morning we saw the comet, at half-past four, in a clear sky. A great humming on the hill; everybody out. There will be more doing when it grows brighter. May. Dear Dr. Halsey: — I don't see how I can make you feel the thrill- ing quality of the work here. We of the Kam- erun interior are in a kind of golden age, a blossoming season, the time of all others for spectacular effect and for exhibit. Particularly a prime time for exhibition because we are still formative. We may become, if we are ade- quately understood, a most glorious example of the fruits of missions. From the standpoint of a visitor this is the time for a visit, for we are still by way of being an adventure, still primi- tive, still romantic. And God is dealing with this forest people in a very moving and inti- mate way, which I take to be an initial way. Myself, I would suffer long journeys to witness such dealing. If only you could come again! We would take much better care of you this time than before, for conditions are changed for the better. And you would do for us again the incalculable service you did before, and we would progress, as we have progressed. I am enjoying my work here immensely. For the first time in Africa I am free of school work and to give my strength to work among women. I was thinking yesterday that I would write you about my adventures, the day's work, for I was all day on the path, and in and out of houses. Sick people I saw and dying, and little newborn babies as marvelous as ever, and widows going to new marriages, and a man beating his wife. It is a mistake to conclude, I suppose, that a man beating his wife is just doing so for love. He may have been provoked. However, my tribal instincts are too strong for me and I called time. The man looked at me with red in his eye and his heart shaking his big ribs. I babbled politely until I thought the woman, unless a fool, must have lit out into the bush back of her house, and until the man breathed easier and his pulse slowed up. He wanted to tell me the palaver, but I did n't want to hear it, for as likely as not the woman was in the wrong. The drum calls the noon hour and I see that I will not be having time to detail all the excite- ments of my day. They were not all violent. May 17. To-day I was speaking to a woman who said : "Mrs. Johnston knew us all, but you are new and to your eyes the people are yet as grass." Yet they are very patient and appreciative. They never question my effort to know them, and they are always saying, "You are friendly; you will end by knowing us all." Myself, I wonder. To-day has been very warm for this season. Coming up the hill with me this evening was such a worried old man, fat and with bad feet. He had lost a girl who said she hated her hus- band and who had run away at dawn. " Maybe she is in your town?" pants he, and shins it up the hill. I don't know whether he found her or not. I hear that I have a drum name to-day; Ndonga says my name is to be, "In every rich town there is something precious." Very neat. Are you not worried about your precious thing that has somehow fallen out of the pocket of your town? May 1 8. This morning most of the parties to the pala- ver of which I was writing last night, came up on the hill, a characteristic company lacking only the husband. The girl, quite young but not an innocent-looking girl, with a new green leaf suspended from a green bead belt. Her two fathers, — don't ask me where she got them, — the old man with the bad feet, not really im- proved by his adventures, and another father more crafty, also more dressy. The mother evidently on the girl's side. The brother, a big stutterer, leading a dog. Lots of palavers come up here to be cut, for we are the only white peo- ple in this region. A dog is dragged to almost every palaver by one of the company. The doctor stopped working to cut this one; it was simple. The girl was sold into marriage before she was grown and now wants to marry an- other man. In every such palaver the white man's government is with the girl; so the doc- tor reminded the two old men and the brother and the dog. The hitch is, a bigger dowry was given by this girl's husband than the modern usage calls for; the old men will be out of pocket when they have returned the present hus- band's goods and have received the goods of the new one. Dr. Weber reminds them that the girl, if she is forced back to the marriage she hates, will run away again; and the girl, from the shade of a tree that makes green lights on her slim brown body, looks at her two fathers with malice and cunning. They go away still gesturing in their agitated and beautiful fashion, the girl walking with a provoking grace, and the dog, who hung back on the way up, hang- ing back on the home run. May 28. Mrs. Lehman came over from Lolodorf, a week ago, and day before yesterday I started back with her to spend one night on the way. I don't know, my dears, why this trip amuses me so soon, — one must usually wait a year or so to be properly amused at one's adventures. Maybe Minteta forced the fruit of this parti- cular journey. Obam was to carry my bed, Minteta to carry my water-bottle and lunch, my mat, too. He is a little boy with inordi- nately long teeth which are always smiling at one. He is a poor little boy at whom every one laughs; no one feels the romance of Minteta but himself. He carries on the business of living along such grandiose lines that he practices many ample parts. On this occasion he was my protector, though Mrs. Lehman called him my "shirt," because Dr. Weber had covered his poor little brown body with a white shirt. Here you have the kind of astigmatic appreciation with which Minteta's epic parts are met. The day was very happy, a beautiful day, and neither of us was tired when we arrived, at something after three, in the little town of Xkole Miale, a village on the top of a great hill and quite in the forest. A village exceptional in its indifference to the things of God. I had the evening meeting in the little palaver house after the great rain; beside our carriers there were three women and a man at the meeting, and a huddle of sweet little brown girls, little slim brown girls like little gazelles. For supper Mrs. Lehman and I had yam soup. We went to bed, she on her bed of leaves and I on my green cot. Outside I could hear the mon- keys in the plantains by the door. Mrs. Lehman went on in the morning and I turned back into the long green descents up which we had come the day before. When we came to the great swamp Minteta went ahead of me, showing his great teeth before which the snakes fled — at least we found none, though we beat the swamp to make for ourselves a better way than the plain way by which Obam traveled with his load. We did not do badly. But we cannot think that you will ever know just how we did. Once out of the swamp we began to ask for carriers, and these the Lord provided ; an old headman and his friend prom- ised to carry me. Obam rigged a hammock of my steamer rug, the one Mrs. Foster gave me, and in the short sling of this your daughter is carried, her muddy white stockings crossed and her good, good feet that never wear out hanging out either side. Very fine. Sometimes we stop and speak with the villagers — I will tell you presently what about. Sometimes we make a cup of tea. "Is the water truly boil- ing?" I ask Obam, and Minteta says, giving me all the reassurance of his teeth, "He would not deceive you!" Another time I duck into a woman's house, and my little "shirt" stops at the door to say, oratorically, "Women sit down in women's houses, but men go to the palaver houses, and I will wait for you in the palaver house." "Yes," say I, "and little boys that don't want to be laughed at must be humble." "A true word," sighs Minteta. So we journey through a golden day, and no rain falls upon us, though it falls everywhere else. June 15. To-day, for all it rained, I had a good meeting at Mbedum. I have been telling the women about the different names of Christ, a matter which must puzzle them, I think, unless it is brought home to them in its parallel to our experience, for we all have more names than one, and there are meanings in our names as there are in his. To-day we were learning about the name that He loved to call Himself — the Son of Man. They liked it, poor souls, and were quite intelligent about it. June 1 8. I have been out all day among the Yemon clan and have had a good day. Corn was ripe in the gardens by the way and I roasted an ear in the embers to keep me merry. You know — or ought to — that a full ear of corn is best achieved by a well-fed lady — she must have well eaten before she goes out to plant. Quite a number of such comfortable people must have planted this year — there are full ears a- plenty. The road to Yemon is pleasant, and there were butterflies in the way to hold up the sloth- ful man. I went to see old Obela, a Christian ancient woman who has outlived her day and still waits her great adventure. I gave myself the excitement of giving her a cloth with which to cover her old brown body. She was less sur- prised than I was, for she could not guess that she was distinguished by my unique charity, the heroine of my unique debauch. Poor old soul, she will enjoy the Communion season bet- ter for her proper dress, her bit of bright cloth about her loins. Obam whispers over his lesson by my lamp and the sound does not make for peace. June 24. The dry season is on, the sky is overcast, there is a deeper depth to the valleys, and the bloom upon the forest is like the bloom on a plum. Soon we shall be leaving for mission meeting; at least, I shall be leaving in the middle of July to help Mrs. Schwab get ready for the guests. Lolodorf, August 12. I write in mission meeting ; it draws to a close. The Webers go home on furlough and I go back to Efulen, to be visited through the year by women from other stations. I mean to get Me- dola, a good and expensive cook, — five dollars a month, — but a trustworthy grown man; I will take younger boys as assistants. I will leave here as soon as Airs. Schwab is free to go with me. Mr. Heminger and Mr. Reis and myself are the Efulen force this year. Mrs. Lehman and Mrs. Good will visit me. August 23. At least maybe it is the 23d. I have been busy and preoccupied and so I shall be till I leave on Thursday morning. Mrs. Schwab goes with me, poor dear, and is the first of those noble ladies who will leave their happy homes to make the Efulen women's work possible this year. Efulen, August 28. I laugh to think of this journey for reasons which may be apparent or may not. I will tell you about the journey before I forget it, but not before I settle. Last night I was much im- pressed by my estate as householder, for I went to bed in my own house for the first time in my life. And glad I was to go to bed, there or in a thicket or anywhere at all. August 29. I sit down at evening in my own half-cleaned house and I feel more than commonly contented, because I can say any sassy thing I please, just as the other real women do, and no one dare answer back. "Fine too much!" I like it so much that I can't get down to telling you about our extraordinary trip. It certainly was an extraordinary trip, and always I shall remember the kindness of Mr. Johnston all through the effort of it. Myself, I have never felt more be- friended. Mrs. Schwab says he is always to be counted on for sure kindness. August 31. Masongo, a beach man educated at Benito, has made for me a translation of Mr. Ibia's "Benga Customs," and has a note concerning a word of which he says, "This is a word ap- plied to women and means 'staggered cox- comb.' " Very neat. One wonders how the title is earned and whether one has earned it. I should say there was quite a crowd of stag- gered coxcombs at the foot of Pikiliki hill when we foregathered after our various disasters. On Thursday morning nine of us started from Lolodorf, and it was raining. Mr. and Mrs. Adams and Evelyn in the Lehmans' jinricksha, Mrs. Ford in my old wheel chair, Mr. Ford on his wheel, and the Hansens on wheels, — all these for the beach. Mr. Johnston on his wheel was to go halfway to the beach, visiting Christian com- munities. Mrs. Schwab, on a wheel, and I in the new one-wheel chair that a friend gave the Goods and that they have put at my service. We two were to turn off at Bipindi — about thirty miles down the highway — and make south through the bush to Efulen. I sat up in my new chair, so happy, my dears, in Dr. Leh- man's rubber cape. Well, it rained. A one- wheel chair is not just simple, but I had two trained men. I was the first to leave Lolodorf. Presently Mrs. Schwab drifted past in the rain, mud to her shoulders. Six miles out I came on her sitting in the mud on a bank eating a sand- wich. Mr. Johnston drifted up, mud to his shoulders; together we looked at this pitiable object and she looked at us. I wanted to go back, but that would have been silly. We went on. The Hansens slipped by, mud to the shoulders; I have not seen them since. On Pikiliki the mud was bad and my men and I fell down, with the chair, but no harm was done except to our beauty. I cried out to the men in my own heathen tongue, "It is all right"; and they brooded over me in terror. At the foot of Pikiliki I found Mr. Johnston and Mrs. Schwab. We made coffee in a hut, and dried out. We were all but off when Mr. Adams came in on foot — the jinricksha had broken down in the mud. Poor Mrs. Adams is still weak from sorrow and illness. Presently in came Mrs. Ford on foot — my old chair had broken down — and Mr. Ford's wheel had broken. You see the staggered coxcombs all foregathering in the rain. Those of us who were fit left our vehicles to the unfit; we started out on foot and beat it. The afternoon was pleasant when it came. Mr. Johnston said that, since we were not to have the chair, he would see us through to Tyange (where our tent and beds and a ham- mock were waiting for us) , and would spend the night there. Mrs. Schwab rode her wheel until perhaps four o'clock, where we turned off the highway, and where we left the others who go to the beach. Jewel Schwab was very weary, poor girl. Mr. Johnston trundled her on his wheel in the narrow bush path, and carried us over streams and cheered Jewel with all sorts of fool talk. We walked perhaps an hour after deep dark — bad walking. When we came to little rifts in the forest there were familiar stars, I never was more glad of them. Ela came out from his town to meet us with a lantern, and so we came in at last very weary, and, for once in my life, footsore. A tent is certainly a blessing. We revived after we went to bed and sat up in our cots to eat cocoanut cookies and to look out at the camp-fire. You must always owe Mr. Johnston for his kindnesses. He left us in the morning and we came on from there with one hammock and four hammock-men, — we rode turn about. We put up on the top of the hill. The next day I made a hammock of my steamer rug, picked up two men, and came in finely. The women here are so sweet about my com- ing back. We are to have a great time here next week when Mr. Johnston visits us for a few days, but just now I can't see beyond my scrubbings and hustlings. To write you this letter, my dears, with my own hand, I drank coffee after my supper. Efulen, September 28. I am coming to be a kind of doctor to the hearts of childless women, of whom there are pitifully many in this country, and to the hearts of those whose little ones have died — and there are many of these. I think that in the geogra- phy of African misery this region of maternal anguish is the most populous. For good reasons many women are barren and many lose child after child at birth. To the sorrow of their hearts are added the burdens of superstition and blame, heavier than you can imagine. A young woman who had lost three babies was hoping so much for a child, but it died at birth. The poor girl was so tormented by her husband and his family that she walked, on that same day, four miles to her mother's town. There I saw her the next day, lying on a pole bed by a fire, her arm across her face, shutting out the world that had so little to comfort her. It was in that girl's heart to think that she had been bewitched, as surely all her people do. She baked me a plan- tain among the embers by the bed, and presently talked to me a little out of her great bitterness. Every day, almost, I have such a talk with such a woman, and I am glad of the things I believe — for the sake of the women I am more glad than words can tell. Just these days we are managing an adop- tion — a baby, whose mother has just died "of a witch," is to be given to a young woman whose four babies never lived long enough for her to hold them. All my conversation with this girl about the little strange baby, whom she has not yet seen, is rather curious. Mejo wants the baby badly, but after a sad and jealous fashion. Doubtless the little thin thing will make its own place in the mother's haunted heart. I see that I am writing you all of one matter, but a matter that bulks so large here and every- where. October 6. Nowadays I don't have a minute to call my own, and this without having any great burden of work. But I have visitors all the time and must be listening at all hours to the story of their lives. If I write at night I can't sleep, so how can I tell about the widow with whom I ran away? This appeared to be at the time quite an episode. I went about it rather nervously, as I suppose all beginners do. But it passed off very well, I thought. We had had word for some time that Minko Meballi's mother, whose husband died the other day, was being abused in all sorts of dreadful ways past writing about. Mr. Heminger was too busy with his Commun- ion crowd to leave the station, so I started off on Monday morning in my chair, with Ndongo Mve and a man from Nkpwa'a. We picked up Minko as we passed her town, quite dressy with a sailor hat. She is a nice woman and strong, which was pleasant and a good thing, as she could carry me on her back over bad washouts, — because always at the beginning of a journey one thinks that this time at least we will keep dry. The road to Tyenge is a by-road. It rained all day. And all day we passed little companies of men going to Tyenge, very dressy, to talk our widow's palaver. Old Binjim was out in the rain, very slow and stiff. When I stopped to drink coffee out of a thermos bottle the pala- ver house was full of men going to Tyenge. You may believe that they were not pleased to see me headed that way, and everywhere I heard, "Ah, mamma, why are you going to Tyenge?" "I am on a visit of consolation," said I. We came to our destination about noon; we had picked up a brother of the widow on the way, not by my intention but by his. Now I had two men who were keen on the adventure — Ndongo and the brother. We went through the first village of Tyenge at a dog trot, and passed the village where the men were assem- bling. They called to us but we did not answer ; we made for a cluster of houses on the side, and I went into the house of mourning. "Where is Zua?" said I, pretty roughly, because I was nervous and because I knew how unlikely I was to get my woman. Mr. Heminger and Mr. Reis had said that I would never get her, but that I could get evidence. Myself, I thought I could not get evidence and so had better try for the woman. The people in the house — all women and one at least a devil — said that Zua was at the river. "Call her," said I, and sat down to shell Ngon seeds with some little girls by the door. Another of the widows, a young woman, very ruddy under her bloom of mourn- er's clay, fell to crying. I was thinking what I would do if Zua hung back, which she was quite likely to do. When I heard that she was coming, I went out and walked across a little field of young corn to where she was making her secret widow's way to her house — no widow may walk in the open. I could see her clay-covered body and the green widow's weeds flapping against her thighs. I caught her by her hand that was very cold, and was surprised to find her fairly young and very big — I suppose I thought I had come to protect a weakling. I fixed her with my eye and my voice and she began to whimper. "You do as you are told and don't you dare disobey the white woman," say I, and I yank my poor widow into the path. It is a shame! Minko says that her mother, when she found her at the river, begged to be left to die. But that dream of luxury was shattered as you see, and I dragged her after me down the path to the palaver house, her hand very cold in mine. The men in the street and under the eaves of the houses stopped talking. It is not customary for a widow to walk abroad, and I would have avoided this breach of etiquette if I could have, but had to manage as quickly and as well as possible. "Where is Mebo?" I asked of a man who had stepped out from the crowd to wait for us in the middle of the path, leaning upon his spear. "I am he." "Mbolo, Mebo," said I. He is the chief in the town. "Ah, Mbolo," said he. "We of the hill," said I, "are weary of the evil news we hear of your town and of this woman. We do not hear yourself evil spoken of, but of your town we hear much evil news. And because we are weary of it I am going to take this woman away. Those who will talk her palaver must talk it on the hill." With this he broke out, but I said: "I will not hear your voice or the voices of the men of this town. I am a woman and I do not cut palavers. It is a small matter that you should come to the hill to talk your palaver, and you will do well to let us go in peace. I take leave of you/' And I bullied my poor widow into the path ahead of me and called up my men, who had hung back I don't know where, and we were out of the town before they could get themselves together. So we made back through the rain with our prize, and I was much touched by the joy of those women who met us by the way and who embraced me and were glad, for all they knew that they would have to suffer many words and blows that night in behalf of the escaped widow. Don't you think it sweet of them to be so glad of what must mean perse- cution for themselves? You see there is here no government officer; we are the only restraining influence, and this was a case of extreme cruelty. We came back in the rain and the next day I was stiff. The widow I have not seen since; she is in her daughter's house. October 23. Last night I saw the Pleiades, to my great joy, drenched in their immemorial bright dew. You see I had been drenched too, for I came home in a terrific rain, afraid of snakes as I climbed the river of the path. Obam met me with a lantern — not from love, as Bitum would have done, but in the way of duty. He is an excellent workman, a great giggler, a fine white- toothed black boy. Ndongo is my steward — an anxious lad, with a frown of attention between his eyes, slow and clean. Madola, who is per- haps forty-five and a beach man, gives me his best. He was once steward on a steamer, and when he means to throw fragments away he says, in English, " It must go for slop-side deck." We have besides a hewer of wood and a drawer of water; and I have, for hanger-on, Minteta, my little honest prig. Or not honest, perhaps, but undoubtedly a prig. Mrs. Schwab goes away next week, when I expect to sob. Mrs. Good makes us a visit, and so for the present I can keep things going here. October 28. I have taken Minteta on to be my very own. Don't know why, I am sure, except that he is the glibbest, most irresponsible poor little prig- gish liar that could be had for nothing. Day before yesterday marked the adoption and I spanked him for stealing potatoes and for ly- ing. He took his spanking very well. We walked out in the afternoon, happy Minteta babbling all the way. "Don't talk," says the brutal mis- sionary; "I will like to hear your voice when I forget your badnesses." You need n't worry — he talked on. Father knows the type of Minteta and that there is nothing in it; but this father does not acknowledge, who has been and always will be an easy mark for those light arrows, plucked out of a goose's tail. Some one "tied" father and me to our amelioration of the condition of Minteta. We have none of the glamour that should cover such futile efforts. Minteta's lies form in my head before they flow out of his mouth. His favorite phrase is, "I could not deceive you"; and indeed he could not: not Minteta. He gambols, poor kid, before the little ark of his pleasures, so movingly, Michal would have to grin. Mrs. Schwab is going after doing all the damage she could in the way of making me de- pendent upon her companionship. Batanga, December 17. Mr. Reis and I have been showing Mrs. Good the path to the beach. We got in yester- day, and this morning have the usual sense of having been beaten. My dears, I am sad because Mr. Martin died. He died at home, in an attack of black MADOLA, THE KIND COOK water. I suppose that no one in that little Scotch village knew how to treat him, and the course of the disease is very rapid. On the road we had such golden moonlight. The first night out I slept in a little house built for a black trader. His counter was the shutter of his window. We let this down, and all night I could see the little clearing bathed in the magic moonlight. There was no sleep that night, but a series of tragi-comic incidents, — punctuated by the exasperated appearances of Mr. Reis from the opening of the hut opposite ours. The most exciting event was the passing of a black soldier, who had come to arrest culprits who had not paid the yearly head tax of six marks, this being the ides of March for such. A clamor from a hut down the street announced him and presently he came into the range of my window — tall, draped in a cloth, his gun in hand, and followed by the depressed shapes of his cap- tives, — I don't know how many melancholy figures, perhaps fifteen, — quite a patting of captive feet upon the highway. Out comes Mr. Reis into the moonlight and the soldier holds up his gang to shake hands. Our own company is placed by this conference among the redeemed, and off stalks the soldier, followed by the flitting brown shapes and the patting brown feet — a kind of ironic parody of a hen with her brood, for the unhappy defiers of the law are scattered in the soldier's rear. After this company chases an old woman, her back eloquent with the biggest and the most agitated grass bobtail I have ever seen. She waggled off, scolding in the most virile accents. She was to return scolding, and we were to lie most of the golden night listening to the most male tirade that ever woman achieved. Some one had stolen her peanut roast. Surely the magic of moonlight is potent that could trans- mute the events of this night into a kind of golden comic memory. Mr. Reis rushed out from time to time to expostulate, but he got so stung by that old viper that there was a little sound of gig- gling from the palaver house where our boys lay. Mrs. Good's visit with us was so much a matter of excitement among the Bulu women, who came from far and near to see the widow of "Ngutu" — to look at her with curious eyes — yes, and with compassionate eyes — the eyes of "real women" who are not without a womanly appreciation of that long widowhood. February 12, 191 1. I have n't taken a pen in hand for two weeks and feel less stale. School has opened. I have twenty- two little girls; eleven live on the hill: cute little kiddies. And two kittens I have that rush at my feet when I rise in the morning, singing little hymns of praise to the feet of their beloved — very gratifying. It is evening and there is a rose-colored moon. I have been to sup with my little girls; they invited me. They were sitting very brave in their clean house, the food on the table, when I arrived. I brought all the arts of a minister's daughter to save the day. We sat down to- gether, thirteen of us. They pressed all the food upon me and would have been glad to have seen me eat it all, but they were comically greedy with each other. What d' you suppose I had for supper? Greens cooked with ngon seed — very good ; and ngon seed cooked with greens — very good; and mashed plantains and cassava cake and roast peanuts. Every one was very happy and beamed on your daughter. Presently up came the rosy moon and shone in upon the open kitchen where we ate, far away from my father's house. March I. Your letter is a perfectly reasonable letter, and the women's questions are perfectly rea- sonable, except when they ask if I am " making good." Even that question, addressed to the right quarter, would be perfectly reasonable. As for me, I am a perfectly good dead cat. I have even perfectly good excuses that would read well in a missionary biography. I spare them. Efulen Station is the oldest Bulu station. It is now fifteen or sixteen years old. There are, as a result of the work, something over two hundred church members, and an immense parish, with adherents in innumerable villages. Two thousand people assemble of a Sunday. The work is exceedingly encouraging, the peo- ple exceedingly responsive. A minimum force for this station would be a minister and his wife, a doctor and his wife, a school-teacher, and a single woman. That is, three men and three women. This year we have had a minister, a teacher, and myself. We hardly touch the work. I have been at the head of the house, of the girls' school, and of the women's work. I run the house with a cook, a washboy, a steward, and a cook's mate. In the morning I oversee the girls' outdoor work and prepare sewing for the sew- ing classes, and hold meetings for the women for a few days before and after the first Sunday in the month, when they come in from outlying districts by the hundreds. In the afternoon I oversee the girls' work in school; and on Wed- nesdays I have a meeting with the women who are leaders in their districts and who report to me conditions in the towns to which I cannot find time to go in these days, and they report meetings held. We pray together for individ- uals; I have a list of such. Sometimes at night I go down the hill to the towns with a lantern, to do some business that I could not find time to do in the day, and always I visit the little girls' dormitories in the evening. And once in a while I help the poor school-teacher struggle with a case of illness, for we have no doctor. It is horrible to see people die for lack of a doctor. I must stop, and I have not given you the sense of a black face at every door, at every window, and the murmur of "Mamma! Mam- ma!" that beats upon one all day; and how sometimes we must say to the women who have come to speak of their souls' salvation, "Go away now, come to-morrow," — because our voice is worn out. S.S. Alexander Woermann, en route for Africa, July 4, 1912. I have been talking a good deal to a man called L., twenty-three years in Africa, a long time in the Congo, and latterly in Kamerun. He was on the boundary commission and stopped at the old clearing when I was first out. I remember him bending over a map in the dining-room of the little old house. He was telling me what he has seen of sleeping sickness. He told me of the first case among white peo- ple, the first in his knowledge or the knowledge of Dr. Sims, — a missionary's wife, Mrs. White, — and of how they thought she had fever, and of how Dr. Sims said to him, "It looks like sleeping sickness." And he said, "Nonsense!" But it was sleeping sickness. He told me of a great smallpox epidemic in the grass country, and of how he made a mask for himself to pro- tect his face from the infected grass by the path. He was not recounting horrors, though this sounds like it. I have just made a note of this among other things that he told me. He is the true type of old coaster, the best type, — pallid, rather well preserved, though I remem- ber him to have been younger seven years ago.1 He knew a Pole many years ago, who was captain of a little steamer going up the Congo; the Pole's name was Conrad! "Yesterday I was twenty-nine years in Africa. How can a man spend twenty-nine years in Africa!" And when I asked him was he meaning that he 1 Mr. L. has since died of sleeping sickness. would not undertake another lifetime of the sort, he was quite indignant. He was just mean- ing how many dangers escaped, for he has been a man of adventure. He was telling me how he once nearly died, literally, of disgust because he had been eating monkey, — did not know it ; his host had the bones and skin brought to the table after the meal. Mr. L. was taken violently ill. Since then he cannot like a man who eats monkey. S.S. Alexander Woermann, July 14. It is a sulky afternoon. Kamerun is hidden in the mist to the east, but we have the dim outline of Fernando Po to the starboard. Far mountains rising at sea; whoever looks at them unmoved, how strange he is! We are reduced to Germans and missionaries. The Englishmen are all gone, most of them left at Secondi. There is a great langour about the ship. We arrive at Victoria after dark. We are at Victoria. It is a heavy night. Fore and aft they have the hatches open and the sick air of the hold is about the ship. Under green lights that are like stage moonlight they are putting the cargo over the sides. The launches are fussing about with their load of silly barges. About the ladders there is the vexed agitation of the white men's little boats, that clamor to which I never become hardened. There are perhaps ten men from offshore to spend the evening. Good-night, my dears. We are so marked by light and noise in the great stillness of the dark that I think you must see us. Father knows so well where to look for us, so exactly very well. Lolodorf, Sunday, July 28. Lots of people glad to see me, and I am af- firmed to be stout. It is evident that my mother fed me well. And has my sister borne a child, and is my father well? The husbands of Chris- tian women who have been converted since I left came to present themselves, sure that I would be glad. There are a number of such men. It was good to look into so many friendly eyes. Ntet has lost a baby and her eyes fill when she sees me. Poor old Anjua is as dis- reputable as ever and Menge as fat. Little girls have grown up into what you might call dam- sels. Everybody is dressed and overdressed. The powerful Nkata is sad behind her tattoo because her girl has gone to the bad. It is night; the woods are very noisy by the Hummels' house; a million insects are fiddling on two strings. This afternoon I was in Esa- bange, where they say, as all this neighborhood does, that I am now a grown woman who came to them a child. August 12, 1912. My dears, I am assigned to MacLean Me- morial Station, alias Lolodorf, alias Bibia. Miss Suderman is also assigned to this station, and the Hummels and the Emersons and the Pat- tersons and Dr. Lehman. Here is an end of a mission meeting which was very exacting to attention and judgment. We were forty peo- ple. Later three men — Lutz, Mertens, and Rode — from the German missions to the north came to visit us. Our German guests left this morning. Last night we were all ready for bed when a horse whinnied in Mr. Hummel's rose garden and immediately there was a clamor from the German's boys, in a tongue we don't know, — the horse was for Mr. Lutz, sent down from Idia. Great excitement in the night, outcries and the wandering of lanterns, Lohen- grin on the porch, stout as usual, rejoicing over his swan. August 15. I have been given a free hand to be in the towns as much as I can, and the people are glad to have me back. After five years, yesterday I was all day in the neighborhood of the old site, hunting old friends on the new highways, and finding a few towns still where they used to be, but half forgotten and overgrown. Old Benzork was sleeping in the house of his favorite wife. His town, that used to be a thoroughfare, is very quiet; the palaver house is fallen, and the grass grows in the street. They woke him to chat with me, and we spoke of the new evils and the ancient glory. Old Mam Ngon is very low; she was asleep in her little hut. I sat down by her head. She woke and called my name and began to sob. Vunga, wife of Benzuhli, who has lost four babies, has a fifth — a beauty. I had my lunch under the roof of Bwajela's new house and then lay down on a carpenter's table under a little thatch. After a long day I came home in a chair. I had eaten out of many kettles by that time, my dears. It is sweet to come home at the end of day in a good chair_by the dim highway. The ajap is bearing fruit now; there is a beauty on the highway, and the carriers sit down by the road to eat the fallen fruit. I am so contented to be at work after the long delay. Bibia, September 3. Yesterday I went from house to house in this neighborhood, and there were women who re- membered me, said they, when I was a little girl. At noon I spread my mat on the pole bed across from Meyee's bed where she lies in her little brown hut — some sort of nervous disr order — imagine it. We talked together through the noon hour; she was telling me that the peo- ple of the town were telling her husband, Woneli, that he must make magic for her or she will die. "Let her die first," says Woneli; "what is death to a Christian?" Meyee quite bursts with pride at Woneli's vicarious fortitude. I said I wanted to go to Abwang, whose child had died; Abwang is a church member. A woman who sat by the door of the hut said she would show me the path; I thought this just a common courtesy; I did n't know that we were to chin our way up the banks of the Bekui and hang on to sapling trees for an hour each way. She certainly was good to me. Once she turned around to find me hung up; back she clam- bered, and she said, very sweetly I thought, "You are not alone in trouble." Coming to the river bank we called, and a man came over for us in a canoe. One at a time we crossed, kneeling in the prow. Up the bank again and through a little stretch of forest to a hamlet on the hillside, very quiet in the sunny afternoon. Abwang lay on her pole bed with her newest baby by her side ; three children she has left. I found that we were six women in the hut, all Christians; I was much struck with such a gathering in that little brown shelter. I asked did Bekalli — the father of the child who died — did he make the usual accusations against the mother? And the women said, No, he just sat in his house and felt grief as they did. By and by I saw him in his palaver house, where he just sat and felt grief. When I got back to Lemizhwon, old Anzia Mpila gave me three cassava cakes, a consid- erable present in these days of famine, and the women said, I — September 6 or 7 or 8. Too bad, I have forgotten what they said. But here is what I saw to-night. I am in Zene- bot, halfway to Lam, staying with decent folk, Ze Mpioga — thick-headed but good. And this is what I saw : — I went with my lantern into Ze's little hut; I sat down by the fire, and there was the family, too. Mendom was heating some water in a big black kettle. The youngest Mpioga, still with- out teeth, was howling in the arms of little brother. Presently to the light of my lantern Mendom brings her three-year-old; she empties her hot water into a wooden bowl ; with a sponge of crushed leaves she washes first one little foot and then the other. Kid howls. His feet are sore, poor little duffer, — he holds out his hand for his father to hold. Mother is relentless until both feet are soaked; then she opens a little leaf packet: there is salve made of the bark of the redwood tree; she adds a little palm oil to this, and very carefully she anoints the little feet. The sobs subside, and the child walks off on his heels. Now the mother pours more water into the bowl, takes the fretful baby out of the hands of little brother, stands the weeny thing in her belt of beads on the clay floor, and swabs her down with water. There is the familiar initial gasp. With her maternal hands she cleanses that little person all glittering with wet, and she says, looking at me and smiling, "God has sent me much trouble." And the father says, apropos of nothing, "All these have been bap- tized." I sit on my stool by the fire and feel steeped in the most human domesticity. Every- where in the world at this hour little children are whimpering over their evening ablutions. It is a mistake to think that any child of a good mother escapes. — So much for the illusions of little boys who would like to be heathen. Efulen, December 16. Here, my dears, is Efulen, but not just as I left it, for where we were three there are now seven missionaries — lots of nice young people. But here are the hills, in their most lovely mo- ment of color; for it is the spring, and the rose and amber and pale green of the new leaf is everywhere under the morning haze. Lovely, lovely valleys; lovely, lovely mountains; like the mountains and the valleys in the back- grounds of primitive Italian pictures. So much beauty frees the spirit, and I would like to do nothing for quite a while but hang over the brink of the clearing. I left Thursday morning, was on the road all day, turned off the highway at about four, and was in the Bulu town of Tyenge before dark. Had a little meeting and then to bed. Off after prayers at daylight for a long, long day in the forest and over the most incredible, heart-breaking, beautiful hills. Paths brown with leaves, promising always to do better and then rearing like a mean horse. It is not much of a path for a chair, and I walked ahead of little Bama and big Se Menge, who felt out- raged, I should suppose, by the treacheries of nature. We made the town of Abiete, rebuilt since my day, by four o'clock. A big clean town. I asked for the headman; was told he was at the beach. Eke! I did not know then that he had gone to the beach a few days before tied up to a pole in a blanket and carried by soldiers. Dr. Weber investigated a case of tor- ture in this town, and found that the headman had tied one of his women to a pole, had beaten her, and had burned her with a torch. The doctor sent pictures of this woman to the ex- ecutive at the beach, and the headman was arrested. Said he would n't go, and so was car- ried. All this a day or two before my caravan put up for the night in the town of Abiete, where we were entertained with extreme and careful courtesy. Only this seemed to me queer — that no woman was allowed to see me alone, and when a group would come into my hut a man stood on guard. I knew there must be some pala- ver on; when I came here I found out just what. I got in to Efulen the next day at three, a good journey, not a pain in my good little body nor a reproach for ill treatment. I must tell you — the day before I left for Efulen I at- tended an adjourned meeting of Presbytery, and heard six young fellows examined with a view to coming under the care of Presbytery — young bucks that want to be ministers, my dears, and I knew them when they were in knickerbockers (note — figure of speech). Ze Tembe, a dashing, handsome young man, full of innocent swagger and a very real eloquence. He has been a Christian for perhaps five years, has never since his conversion had a serious palaver, wears his beautiful youth and "his Christian successes with a kind of spirited and happy humility, is as definite as Peter in his expectation of an unblemished devotion to his Master. Next him, fumbling at his cap and answering in a low voice, my Bitum — no dimples. Yes, he once had a palaver; yes, he thinks in his heart that some may have been converted by his preaching, perhaps so, yes, perhaps so ; and behind him sit his two brothers, who were, indeed, converted by his preaching — Melom, a strong evangelist and a man; and Etunde, as old, perhaps, as Bitum, but child- like; beloved by his elders; just in from service to the Yaunde tribes; making naive gestures upon this solemn occasion, stretching his arms and sprawling as men do in the palaver houses, and without any sense of the direction of ques- tions, so that if he were not handled by as wise a man as Mr. Dager, our Etunde would lose out. A SCHOOL-TEACHER AND HIS WIFE Between these two brothers, Melande, whom you may remember, who has been for years a faithful and blameless evangelist ; who — im- agine it in this country — went virtuous to a marriage with a virtuous girl. There is no emo- tional quality in his response, but a very con- vincing and steadfast devotion. Then there are Bikwe and Nna, another brother of Bitum, and Mengun — these last are not present. Lolodorf, January 6, 19 13. I left Efulen on Friday; we slept the first night at Nyabizimbi, as I had made up my mind to try a bush path to Lolodorf. The soldiers had been in Nyabizimbi all day; the husks of the corn they had eaten littered the deserted villages. They had been sent in on a punitive expedition, as the Nyabizimbi people were ordered out of their present neighborhood onto the road from Bipindi to Nkonemekok, and had not stirred themselves. They live along an old road that follows a river; the forest is full of beasties here; we saw the tracks of wild cows, and monkeys dropping in the most careless fashion through the open spaces between the great trees across the river. Nice walking in the golden afternoon. Very quiet in the vil- lages, where the houses were all empty and all open, like the houses in stricken towns every- where and in any age. We came to one where an old man and an old woman sat under the eaves of a hut, too feeble to escape, in a panic at the sight of us, witless; and when we asked the name of the village the old man declared that he did not know. "I don't know, I am just an old man. I have lain on my bed ten dry sea- sons." "Ah, brother," says Se Menge in his lazy, laughing voice, "ten dry seasons you have lain on your bed in this village, and you do not yet know the name!" We sat down for a few minutes in this com- pany, out of humanity. At five o'clock we came into the last village of Nyabizimbi. There was a lame man and a woman sick of yaws. We said that we would sleep there. By sunset the lame man was beating the drum to call in the fugitives. They came slipping back from the forest, and by dark we had quite a meeting. Everybody very pious after the misfortunes of the day. They put me in a rather nice house ; I noticed two holes, perhaps two inches across, in the clay of the floor, and was told that big spiders lived in those holes. My man filled them in and stamped on them. Much to my own surprise the thought of those spiders spoiled my peace. More nice road in the morning until nine o'clock, when we turned off from Minken into the forest with an idea of coming out at Nkutu. As a matter of fact, we came out six hours east of there at five o'clock in the afternoon. We had been warned by the people at Minken, where we had a meeting, that the path was bad, and it was bad. The chair-men will never forget the miseries of that day, carrying the length and the weight of the chair through the broken ways of the forest. I should have had a man with a cutlass to go before us. It was a hard day, and I was most grateful for my good feet. Mrs. Weber had given me a good lunch; there was fruit-cake intilt, and every now and again I sat down at the bottom of the forest to eat some bread and a bit of cheese and that fruit-cake — the best ever, I think. Late in the afternoon we came out by a river, the open sky the surprise it always is after a journey in the forest, and for more than an hour we walked through abandoned clearings. There is a pe- culiar beauty, noble and serene, about these abandoned clearings. The walls of the forest rise about the open grassy spaces that are like lakes, broken here and there by islands of palm trees or little ruined huts overgrown with vines. I have often felt the large peace of these empty clearings and never more than on Saturday in the mild afternoon sinking to evening. We thought, when we came at last upon a village, — we came in by the back yard, — that we were at Nkutu, but we were far from there. We had left our lantern in the forest; I did not try to find out who was to blame; we had shifted loads after a rest. Kungulu is two miles from Nko Ekuk, where we came out; Ze Zohnema is there as evangelist. We should have liked to go on to that town, but were too tired. I had my supper in bed; was about to eat it in the dark when Ze appeared with a lantern — so the Lord provided light. Sunday we went to church at Kungulu; had two meetings. Had a meeting at Nko Ekuk in the evening, sitting on a call drum ; the lantern — the miraculous lantern provided by ravens — on the ground, and the miraculous stars as bright as miracles above. Many carriers at the meeting. Early in the morning — Ek6 ! My dears, I woke, my watch said four — the best time to wake on the road. I got up and called the men ; Bama came stum- bling with sleep through the dim moonlight; I looked again at my watch — half-past twelve. Work it out for yourselves. All hands back to bed. We were off at nearly five. Found aw- fully friendly people at Melan. Here we turned off for a few hours in the forest; not such bad going, and I had sense enough to keep away from my men and their struggles with the chair. Indeed, I was most happy from ten to three, walking in the gray and green of the forest, sometimes in little clear streams. Not bad walking at all. Several services of fruit-cake. Se Menge carried me on his shoulders when we came to mud. It rained, and silver struck the million leaves. At three we came out upon the highway; I did not guess it till I had passed the lemon grass that borders it, but there it ran, broad and clean, east and west. We were a tough-looking crowd. Slept at Mebande and were back here at noon. January. I am staying a few days in a village called Muga, by a river among the purple hills. Every- where in the forest now the new leaves are burn- ing bright, like our own forests in the autumn ; under the haze of the dry season our violent spring lights a thousand torches. I am living rather grandly in the house of a man who is ambitious. There are three rooms in his house; the roof is high, ducks and chickens are under- foot, but I have the goats rather well in hand — "they very much fear the white woman." I am the guest of the town. These people are old friends of mine; they are from Ipose; and I fare sumptuously every day out of their kettles. I am to have a fish for dinner, — a brown girl is busy on the floor of the hut with a big silver fish to be baked in green leaves. She laughs at my two little green peppers — two peppers are just nothing at all. I am to have, besides, a plantain baked in the ashes. At sunup we go by little grassy paths to a village near by, where we have prayers. The Christians of this neighborhood and of every neighborhood have morning prayers before they go about their business. "At the time of the opening of doors" they straggle through the wet grass to some central village, hugging themselves against the morning chill. I begin my day with them. By seven the villages are deserted; the people are off in the gardens, or fishing, or felling trees in the new clearings, or hunting nuts in the forest. These mornings I have been writing, clearing off long-standing debts. At noon two Christian women will be here "to show me the path" among other vil- lages. We shall visit in the brown huts where the big black kettles will be steaming over fires laid upon the floor. Most people are at leisure after three o'clock. At sunset we shall be coming back to these uplands above the river; the white woman's portion will be brought her in a green leaf spread upon a wooden basin, and our day is done. It is rather forlorn in a native village between six and seven of an evening; at least, I always find it so; then I wish I were anywhere else. The smoke of the many fires wavers above the leaf thatch ; women sit at lei- sure by the open doors ; the evening comes down out of the sky above the clearing very firmly and very gently; no long twilights or other finicking nonsense; the stars keep their dates. Everything looks all right, but — I don't know — it is forlorn. Happily no one else suspects this; all the others think that they are at home. Bibia, February 23. Now I will be telling you how Miss Suder- mann and I went to see the dwarfs on Wash- ington's birthday, she very pretty and I "not so much like a white person," as a woman told me the other day. We got off no earlier than nine o'clock, which we regretted at the end of the day, for we did not get home until six. For three hours we walked west on the Yemvam path, — a good forest path, well settled. At noon we turned off toward the Malumba hills, through old gardens and up a steep ridge by a little trail. We had our lunch on the way, be- cause what is the use of going to see the dwarfs and doing vaudeville stunts like eating? I mean, we ate before we got to the town, because if we had eaten in that community we would have absorbed all the interest that we meant to arouse by the Word of God. I imagine we ab- sorbed a lot of it, anyway. On the top of our little ridge we came into a large air and a fine view of the precipitous Malumba hills. We were among them. Here was a little clearing — two shelters without a front wall, pole beds beside a fire smoking under the thatch. Some one who had been weaving a sling — one of those slings that women put about their foreheads and so carry their baskets — had thrown the work aside. The rough shells of ngale nuts were on the ground. Nothing doing in that little clearing, nothing but sun- light and the thread of smoke from the embers. We went on a few hundred yards to a clearing — two bark houses and two shelters. In one of the houses, on a bed, a dwarf, who looked up and did not answer, and then did answer. A dwarf woman lay on a bed in a dark corner, ill with measles. A quarter of an hour farther on we came into the town of Mapvundi, whose son Mampuer we used to know in the old days. This is a very orderly little town surrounded by a plantain garden. Dwarfs do not as a rule build towns or plant gardens, but here was the bark house of the superior tribes, thatched with leaves, and smaller than usual. There was in every house a hunting-net — one of those long, long nets, made of a hemp cord, with which the hunters fence in a section of the forest. In the palaver house, low, open on every side, a num- ber of dwarfs sat, hairy-legged, with the face that is more like the gorilla's face than the faces of other men are. These were men, some of them with babies on their knees. Old Mapvundi, the headman, is not small. Few of these dwarfs were noticeably small or timid or dull. They were very friendly. Presently the women came in from the gardens, some of them very little persons. They came into the village single file, wagging their little bustles; dived into their huts and emerged in dresses. Yes, my dears, dresses. And cloths. The women have, so much less than the men, that curious look of melan- choly that comes like a shadow over the shal- low brightness of a dwarf's face. There were something like thirty in and out of the palaver house by the time we got down to business. Even the women understand Bulu, though their affiliations are all with the Ngumba. We talked together for perhaps an hour. This set- tlement is within three hours of Muga, where we have a Christian community, and these dwarfs know the Muga people. I was telling them how a person of God says: "I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord." Just as a woman is glad when her husband says: "Let's go to see your father." And does she go with shame or with fear to her father's house? And what father, when he has sent for his girls, but looks for the last and the least one to come, before his heart sits down? And what girl is so heartless as to hate to rise and go to her father's house? So we talked long, and learned our verse with giggles and with sudden lapses into an aspect of profound and anxious melancholy. At the end of our time we were much approved. We went away into the forest with friends to show us the path, and when these fell away one by one the peace of the forest was all about us. In our deserted clearing we found a little dwarf woman put- ting her bit kettle on the fire, filled with plan- tains. She was eager with a smiling and nervous affability. Her husband was out hunting; to please me she told me that he was a person of God. I asked her if she knew who Jesus is, and she pointed with her finger to the sky, looking at me with that sudden and haunting melancholy. When we got down the hill into the Yemvam towns every one asked us, " Did you see them? " and laughed as real people always do when they speak of dwarfs. "And what did they give you? 99 Because no one goes to the dwarfs except to beg — for nuts or honey or a piece of meat. I heard a Yemvam woman ask my little Bulu boy, "And did Ngiamba really do no more than say, 'Go in peace'?" — Ngiamba being the wife of a dwarf — a person to be begged of — to be bullied, if necessary, into the making of those little presents which are the links between a dwarf and the august members of other tribes. McLean Memorial Station, March 2. To-day is the first Sunday of the month, and therefore collection Sunday. We had a congre- gation of something like nine hundred fairly orderly Ngumba and Bulu people, who achieved the feat of rising to sing a hymn and of reseat- ing themselves when the hymn was sung, in quite a seemly fashion. We used, when we rose to sing, to stampede in a sort of stationary fashion; that is, we did not desert, but we ex- ercised within limits — great yawnings and stretchings and scufflings of feet. So for a long time we were suppressed; we sat through our hymns. Of late we rise from time to time, and with growing distinction. To-day over sixty men confessors presented themselves to Mr. Emer- son, or were presented by the Christians of their neighborhoods. These are the fruits of the last month in this neighborhood, for the station church takes care of about a third of our parish. Mr. Emerson has a native church thirty miles from here to the east, and another nearly as far to the west. And there are leaders at intervals of from three to five miles all along this great highway. Mr. Emerson is a very efficient organ- izer, with a great knack for developing native talent. You will realize that we need just this gift in a work that has grown beyond the ability of the white man. Benito, Spanish Guinea, March i&. I came here to be a month with Mrs. Wright, and to-night I sleep in a plank house, who am a person of the bush, bred up between four walls of bark. This clearing is by the sea, or by the Benito River, or by the confluence of these. To-night, when I look out in the moonlight, I look south- west on gray water; to the left the Benito River comes in; to the right the beach runs a little NGUMBA WOMEN CARRYING FIREWOOD way west and then north; our little settlement faces the Equator — a hundred miles away. I left Batanga last Monday morning, and made the one hundred and seven miles in six days. The path runs south all the way by the beach. The tides are tremendous in these ides of March. I would have walked at night, but I could not reconcile the moon and the tides, so we walked under the sun, that old enemy. Three men of my little caravan of four were from the forest; they were filled with wonder and a kind of impatience at the punctual habit of the sea. The fourth man was a Benok of the beach tribe; he carried my pantry and was our guide. He was too proud to speak our forest tongue. How was he — a Benok of the beach — to know the silly Bulu speech of the forest people? Only when the white woman spoke were the ears of our guide unstopped. My Bulu, you would have said, was of a peculiar virtue. A Bulu boy carried my cot and tin box. My own two carriers I had on my chair — Bama in the shafts to the rear, Se Menge in the shafts forward. The one wheel of the chair made a clean mark on the sand when I jogged along at ease beside a low tide, but, oh, my dears, how it ploughed a weary way through the hearts of Bama and Se Menge when the sand was heavy or the tide high! There was then no question of my riding; I walked. Bama cooked my meals, as he always does. There is no kinder person to me than little Bama — he serves me with an infinite patience on our wanderings, with a patience that waxes toward evening and is at the full when we settle for the night by our roadside fire. This gift of waxing patience is no commonplace; most of us wane in virtue with the day, and are on pretty sharp edge before we come to roost. Many times I have blessed Mr. E., who gave me little wizened Bama from his own caravan over a year ago. Last night with my supper of fried banana and boiled rice he gave me a little harangue — that I must bear up — that there was "iron in food" — that our journey was near the dawn. All maternal concern he was then, and I was coming up out of the maudlin depths of fatigue to the sound of that kind urgence. To- night I wear fine linen, sleep under a zinc roof, and have a goat chop for supper. I shan't be thinking of Bama until I go on the road again. These sudden changes in fortune — how they divorce friends ! I write to you in pencil, my dears, because it is easy, and I must do the easy thing or nothing at all. And I would rather do that last, any- way. We are all tired. Yesterday, on the last lap of my journey, I was wishing I were one of the old canoes under the eaves of the houses. When a canoe gets old here, they cut away the ends and turn it upside down under the eaves. There it is for a seat; it never journeys forth any more. All these little cabins by the sea have such a bench under the thatch outside the door. And all these little villages are full of the em- blems of the sea, and the wind from the sea, and the talk of the sea. It is extraordinary to what an extent the sea dominates its margins. At all of my little meetings I have heard the Lord's Prayer in Benga, the people chanting in con- cert the most beautiful spoken word I have ever heard, and the sighing swell and ebb of it is like a voice of the sea, the voice of many waters, unified in a strain of passionate melan- choly. I have never heard any spoken word so compounded of the elements and the emotions. But I have seen so much new beauty in this last week and in such a perceptive fashion as fatigue produces — I mean so objectively perceptive — that I feel very wise; you know that wisdom that answers from the deeps to the face of new beauty and then is submerged again like per- ceptions in a dream. From Batanga to the Campo River the coast is of extraordinary beauty. Here the cliffs to the east shut out the morning, and to the west the thin veil of the forest is pierced and slit and torn by the bright pallor of the sea. I always imagined that the forest by the coast was fairly inhabited and so, used and stale. But there are empty miles be- tween the villages where the virgin forest comes darkly down to the white foam of the sea. The little path runs between these in and out of the gloom, over the rocks and out upon the sands. Very few people travel north and south on this coast, so one is alone for hours. In the afternoon there is another beauty, for then the forest is full of sifted light. There is then no mystery, but a kind of ordered magnificence, an illusion of avenues and terraces and delib- erate surf. Everything waits for something understood and adequate. Only, my dears, in the middle of the day, when the tide is high and the path is in the sand, you know just where you are and you wish you were a crab to dodge sideways into a hole, down and out of the furies of the light. Se Menge was detailed, because of his huge size, to carry me over the rivers, but failed igno- miniously in the character of St. Christopher. His quakings before a tide-swollen river were pitiful. He crossed the Itondi before I got there. I don't know how he had the nerve, but from the other side he watched me, his cloth kilted up about his thighs, until a man from a village came over for me and took me on his back. My men go back in the morning. They are in a panic, poor souls, for they can't think how they are to make their crossings without me to worry the people into getting them over in canoes. I shall tell you all about my trip, but this note goes back with them and should catch the German steamer from Kribi in Kam- erun. March 20. I was telling you about my trip down the coast to Spanish Guinea. We left Batanga on Monday and slept at Lolabe, in a sordid little village where there is a man who claims to be a Christian, and who is, says Mr. Cunningham, in his most rolling Scotch accent, " double- faced." In the bamboo hut of the "double- faced" Mukoko I went to bed. A palaver raged outside until I lit my lantern, opened the door, and asked for peace. It was a starry night; the accuser and accused were afoot and gesticu- lating; but the audience had spread grass mats upon the ground and were lying at ease. In such comfort the palaver might have contin- ued endlessly. At the word of the white woman that impassioned shrill oratory ceased, brown bodies rose up from the ground, stretched them- selves, brown mats were gathered up, little brown groups wandered off to disappear under the dark eaves of the houses, and then the warm night in the clearing pulsed with the stir of the sea — good time to drop asleep on a green canvas cot in the rat-infested hut of the " double- faced" Mukoko. We were walking all the next day. At high tide we ploughed through the dry sand, at low tide we pattered along the hard beach finely. The sun was low when we came to a river cross- ing, where I was carried by one Mayo through the warm turbulence of the tide. On the back of this new friend, with my shoes hanging round his neck by their lacings, and the water about my arm-pits, I thought I saw the sea tumble downhill upon us. That was the effect of the tide coming over the sandbar into the back- water. Our dumb Benok guide was on the off side, — meaning, I think, to recover his white woman if she washed away, — and suddenly voluble in a language which I understood. That night I slept in a charming bamboo house, clean and gray with the soft color of old bamboo. Iyanga was my host, a kind and dig- nified person who understood Bulu. Other Christian people there were, too, who under- stood Bulu, so that we were able by lantern light in the sandy street of that little hamlet to " speak three words of the Word of God." We crossed the river the next day at noon. Here the Campo is the boundary between Ger- man Kamerun and Spanish Guinea, but a few days* journey up the river, it used, before the French Concession of 191 2, to be the boundary between the German colony and the French Congo. Ntyorera, a Gaboon man, is in charge of John Holt's trading-post here; he is young, heavy-featured, laconic. I used to know his mother when I lived in the French Congo, and he was very kind to me in the proud M pong we fashion. The Mpongwe is the recognized aris- tocrat of our beach tribes. They are great givers of gifts — noblesse oblige. And Ntyorera gave my poor forest bumpkins gifts of rice and fish "on top"; he gave me a tin of black bread, — that would be good for me, he said, — and other tins he would have given me, but I called a halt, having accepted enough to appease Mpongwe pride. His wife, a pretty Gabonnaise, put me down at their table to a service as clean and formal as a white man could have man- aged "in these days, in these streets"; a fried mullet and a boiled plantain I had there, and they were good. We crossed the Campo in Xtyorera's canoe. There is a very noble forest about the mouth of the Campo. It is true that I myself am a person of a noble forest, but here is the double magic of forest and sea. So that we bush people "very much wonder and ad- mire." Directly south of the river a few miles there is a fine cliff jutting out into the sea. We slid past this between waves — to the silly hor- ror of my men. We made poor time that day, — no more than twelve miles, I should think, — and were all day doing it at that ; slept the night in a forlorn little hamlet called "London." He! The little hamlet of London — all dark under the moon — its little huddle of bamboo huts under its little huddle of cocoanut palms all brown by the white foam of the sea! Ma- menji gave me his poor hut, and because I knew that there are people of the tribe of God in that town I called them together. I could not speak their dialect, nor they the Bulu, but they could look at their white woman, and I could give them that pleasure. In London there is an old Christian with quite the grand manner and a great white beard, a distinction in this country, where most men shave. To see this old perfectionist give up his seat to Se Menge and to see my mighty lum- mox accept this sacrifice in his brute fashion was to see a little comedy in sentiment — the man of sentiment meets the natural man. Thursday at one we came to Evune, where Mbule Ngubi is the minister. My dears, you must read your Theocritus if you are to have any sense of that village by the sea, sunk in the shade of cocoa trees, the little bamboo houses filled with the wind and the murmur of the sea ; nets drying in the sun or hanging furled under the eaves, canoes drawn up under the cocoanut palms that crowd about the path from the beach to the settlement. When I came out of the glare of the open into the dusk of the cocoa trees, grand young men shook me by the hand. I don't know who they were — the gilded youth of Evune. Mbule Ngubi has what we call a "deck house," a house on posts with a plank floor. He is a tall man, perhaps fifty, with more of a grand manner and a beautiful simplicity. He put me into a clean room flooded with light and wind. Himself, he spread the bamboo slats of the bed with clean sheets. Water was brought me. I bathed and lay with my helmet over my eyes in that little chamber by the sea — and gave thanks. We had our supper together. " My sister in the Lord is here," says Mbule Ngubi, "and shall I not kill a chicken?" We had a chicken and mashed plantain, with a sauce of palm oil. Here we had an evening service in that bamboo house which the people of Evune built for their Lord; quite a beautiful little chapel. So much order, so much kindness, so many bright stars above the little village and the wide sea! We were off before dawn. Ngubi ferried us over the two waterways with day- light, and at last when Se Menge got into a very small canoe with my diabolical wheel chair, that great hulk (Se Menge) so undisciplined, overturned the canoe and threw Mbule Ngubi, in his best black trousers, into the sea. You begin to perceive the part poor Se Menge plays in our adventures. At ten we come to another waterway, and at noon to the crossing of the Etonde River. We waited on a barren beach for a canoe to ferry us across. Then passed a thousand years of sunlight. I built a little shel- ter of my rubber sheet. My men shouted con- tinually in the sun-struck stillness, but the little settlement on the other shore slept beneath its palms. At last, in the eternity we had accepted, a man was resurrected ; we watched him dawdle about the launching of his canoe and paddle across to our rescue. His townspeople, he told us, were busy burying their headman. I rested an hour in that village, where the people did not mourn their dead until I left. I don't know why. Perhaps the dead man had been be- witched, and there would be no use settling to the business of that sort of investigation while the white woman, whose heart is the heart of a white woman, sat in the guest-house. I saw his widows sitting in the ashes — naked and daubed with clay. From their chalked faces their glanc- ing eyes looked out bright and very dark. I knew they were safe so long as I should sit down in their town, but I could not stay for that, poor souls ; and perhaps they were safe, anyway. When our caravan was well out of the village, the concerted wail of the mourners rose from the many little roofs. He ! The long, long day ! At four we stopped at the little village of Bomuda. I asked leave to change my dress in a black trader's house. They are very kind to me here; they spread a white cloth on a box and set me a little meal. Makemani, an old Christian, puts on his best and comes to look at me with wise and gentle eyes. At five we pass the beach of Bata; an Englishman changes some money for me at John Holt's trading-post; he looks as groomed and shaven as if he were alive. It is in the trading-posts of Bata that Rockendembi, the old Fang chief, is so much feared. He comes down from the interior (of Spanish Guinea, you understand) gun in hand. With his fol- lowing of young Fang bucks he invades the stores. Then is bargain day in Bata. We of the Kamerun do not know what to make of such fashions; our chiefs are unarmed, and better-mannered. But we shudder deliciously when we tread the scene of such adventures. Bata, with its little cluster of European houses about its little bay, is asleep in the late sun- light. It is so dead in Bata that myself, a per- son of the bush, I should be wishing every day that Rockendembi with his vivid clan would come to Bata. I should be wishing every day, if I lived here, for the sight of those ivory brace- lets and those brass spear-heads, for the loud laughter and the arrogance of that forest com- pany, for the smell of wood fires that hang about a caravan like Rockendembi's. At six we come to a big Kombe settlement on the Ekuku River. Here Ipuwa's boy meets me and takes us by a long, long way through meadows to a street that runs down to the river. Here is Mbela Etian's house, a rambling "deck house." Mbela Etian is the son of Etian, the minister, and is clerk in the house of an English trading firm here. Etian is dead, and his son is a man of this world, but he likes to remember that his father was a minister. Mbela put me in a huge room. I can't tell you how good this room looked to me. There was water in great jugs; there was a bed — big past reason — spread with clean linen. When I lay on my bed it felt so good that I wished myself bigger so'that I could sprawl over more of it; I enjoyed a deeper sense of luxury in that room, open to the kind night and the Ekuku River, than I have ever done. I could hardly sleep for won- der at so much comfort ; and my men slept that night for the first time "since they were born" in a "deck house.' ' Pillows were offered them and I heard the sensation produced by these. I knew that they would be covered with red and white calico — a red design of a sort dear to the beach tribes — applied to a white surface. All these days we had been carrying a clock. Certainly the wisdom of a clock is a thing to admire; you cannot deceive a clock. The dark of night cannot deceive a clock ; it is or it is not morning. Like the voice of the Guinea fowl that speaks in the dark before the dawn, breaking slumber at the moment ordained from "the birth of men," the clock puts a little knife into the travelers dream. Before the stars were dim the clock had us out of our haven, and who knew when, if ever, we were to sleep in a "deck house" again. Mbela himself took us across the river. I waited for my men and my loads on the south beach while the dawn came. We made good time that day until eleven — a fine run on a level beach. And then the tire of my chair went flat. Se Menge had broken my pump two days before, and I walked seven of our last ten miles when Mr. Wright met us. That day I saw stockaded villages, a thing that has passed in the Kamerun. One village with a double stockade I saw. This coast is lined with new settlements of forest tribes — very timid, very degraded — who have just emerged from forest life to beach life. Before every village of a beach tribe the canoes lie under the shade of a group of cocoanut palms — a blue shade on a white sand. Here the beach men sit and gossip. But these other aliens, so much of the forest, so strange to the sea, take their anxious ease behind stockades. The clock, my dears, speaks its inexorable word. It is still with me. Bama and Se Menge sleep in the quarters, obviously people of an- other tribe than my father's tribe. The moon- light sleeps in the long plumes of the bamboo about the Benito house spring. The white tide draws in to its gray sleep before my door, and the Southern Cross, in a sky washed by the moonlight of lesser stars, leans to its setting and sleep. It would be well that white people sleep ; only fishermen and runaway lovers — yes, and the spirits — are abroad at this turn of the night. March 31. Good news! The lovely Mrs. Wright has a lovely little daughter. Batanga, Kamerun, May 3. We — myself and Mr. Cunningham, who has been visiting the people of God in Gaboon, ar- rived from Benito in the middle of last night. We came up in the Robina, a thirty-foot boat that carries a mainsail and a jib. There is a deck of adjustable planks over the stern and an awning above this, but the awning must come down with the change of wind. Mattresses are laid out on the platform and the passengers laid out on the mattresses. So sweet, my dears, to lie with the gunwale on a level with you and with your nose all but cutting the water when you hang over. We had four of a crew and four black passen- gers mixed up with the rigging and our boxes. There was a great laughing and the character- istic bubbling of Benga talk — the crew are Benga men because this tribe are expert sea- men. If you could only see our captain, Iveki, son of the great Ibia, born when I was, but, oh, my dears, of such a different kind of poetry. He is quite the perfection of his type, — a type that you will never see, — and that is a pity. I hunt the word that will present him to you. His beauty is all slim and eager in action, and in repose is fairly massive. He sits idly, his hands at ease, but his action is immediate and exact. He smiles for secret reasons suddenly and slyly, and again he smiles suddenly and frankly. His teeth are amazing, so perfect and small. His chin is slight above his strong neck; his nostrils are delicate ; he has the beard of adoles- cence and eyes of a woman. Sex plays with him a double game, and I have seen other Africans who show the same expenditure of charm — a feminine grace all velvet over the rock of heathen man. The wind served us ill; we had long hours of rolling calm and of the most outrageous sunlight. One day we rowed for hours close in, to the sound of a tremendous surf. We were trying to land, and at last we came to the sacred rock of which it is not well to speak the name, and to which tobacco is offered and rum is poured into the sea for libation. We were too poor to per- form these rites or too impious. Back of this rock is a little place of calm, a haven. We went ashore here and made a real meal in a town near by. The nights were broken and memorable. We slept, lying on our mattresses, and the gray water slipped by. There were clouds and stars in the sky and to the east the dark line of shore. We heard the surf all night. When the sheet struck the water there was a line of phosphores- cent fire and new constellations whenever the men bailed the boat. One night it stormed, and I lay under the boom and the reefed sail as deliciously snug as the unfledged. There is no comfort, think I, all cozy in my shelter, like the comfort of vagabonds ! and I sleep again, to find the wind fallen, the sky washed and tumul- tuous with stars, and old Masongo trampling on his passengers and busy with the sail. So we slept and woke and slept again; when the shadow of the sail was plain on the water, that was morning; then the gray of the world paled, and the stars in the sky and the little fitful stars by the boat-side died. We were three days coming up, and I had got quite out of the way of expecting to get any- where when I woke to find Mr. C. sitting up beside me in the stern of the boat shouting out to 1 1 mind the rocks ! " ' ' You '11 be on the rocks ! ' ' shouts Jimmie. It is customary to shout when you make a landing, and I always quake be- cause I forget that it is customary. Lights were on the water's edge. As a matter of fact, we made a good landing, riding in on the curling of surf to the light of the lanterns ashore. The black boys rush out to meet us, get a rope from the bow, and hold her steady by this. I sit on the gunwale with my legs over the side waiting to be picked off. In my eyes the lanterns and the incessant white surf are a dazzle. Presently along comes Masongo, tall and lean and kind. He presses through the surf. His head is about on a level with my knees. When we next ease down a bit I let myself go into his arms and am carried ashore and go to bed. Old Masongo — how kind to me he was! Mr. C. teased the men about ''calling up the wind," and they laughed. But once, when Mr. C. and I were asleep, I saw Masongo looking for the land breeze and call- ing softly the old incantation "braka epupu, viaka"! And of course the wind rose. He! my dears, how far you live from these adventures. Batanga, Sunday, May 4. I have received father's letter with his judg- ment as to my next winter. I am turning things over in my mind. The idea of leave of absence does not appeal to me, as I don't see the logic of it. If I am — well, I don't see when I am likely to return, if I am needed at home; and if I am not needed at home, I would stay on here. To-night, my dears, at sunset, Kamerun Mountain and Fernando Po rise out of the sea as blue as plums and as clear as Fujiyama in a print. Lolodorf, May 31. I sent off my cable yesterday, and am per- fectly satisfied that I have done the right thing. You need not worry about my being contented at home. I am very much comforted by the attitude of the older missionaries. They think that my place is at home if I think so. And you must say very simply to every one, that I have come, since the changes of the last four years, to feel that my place is at home. If you just say those words, neither more nor less, you will speak my truth, and you will find how receptive of a natural truth people in general are. I have no ques- tion in my own mind that I am on the right track, and I have no question of my happiness at home. I mean to take an inland journey during the dry season — nothing extreme at all, as I have not the strength to undertake an extended one. But a pleasant journey. I shall sail for home in the middle of October. June 6. Yesterday some Ngoe women, who are much more naive than the Ngumba, came to the house of Ze to dress, four or five of them just in from the garden, their bright cloths in their hands. "Where is your mirror?" they ask Ze. "My mirror? Where is everything I own? My girl Ntolo has taken it to school, with my handker- chief and my piece of soap." But she produces a mirror, and there follows one of the most feminine performances you ever saw. There are as many ways of binding your head with a handkerchief as there are hats in a shop. In their bits of loin-cloths the women bound their bandanas, holding the little mirror between their knees as they stood. Such prinking, such laughing ! Eyinga, the middle-aged — lovesick to the point of death for Se Menge, but since recovered — was found to be adjusting the third handkerchief over other two. "Eyinga, you will kill yourself!" says Menge. But they all took a hand in the arrangement of this, a woolen one with fringe. It is fine to have a fringe of fringe! This done, it seemed that all was lost — her head was too big for the neck of her dress. "It must be undone," says Eyinga desperately; and they all laugh. "The per- spiration runs down you like a river," they tell her. And I say, "She must be got into that dress somehow, and at once." She stands, smoth- ered, her arms raised while they tug at her dress. She emerges, red woolen fringe and anxious face. Her coquetry is of a very serious type. Our meeting, after so much vain flourish, was a good meeting, because the women behaved with such dignity, in such a womanly fashion. The home where we met was crowded, and now one and now another of the Ngoe women stood to speak, dark against the brazen light of the door, taller herself than its opening, smitten with gold under her chin and along the contour of her cheek, from the sun on the street. June 9. I like the house I am resting in so much : clean, doors to the ground, five good Bulu beds, a good floor. Azimbo is cooking me yams with olon, the bark of a tree that tastes like garlic; she leans from her hips to grind the bark. She has washed me an enameled plate and an iron fork; she puts a little box before me. My food is set before me covered with a bit of green plantain leaf.' The forest looks in at both doors, for this is the Medon road. There is an excess of hos- pitality in this house ; am here an hour and have seen Azimbo feed five guests. Ze Vupvuma, one of my chair-men, says, " Don't anger me. My angers when I am an- gered are terrible !" Needless to say, he is not talking to me, but to Se Menge. Ze says, "Am I your wife that you scorn me so?" He is a queer duck. Well, my dears, we have come on two miles and are going to have a meeting under the roof of a native carpenter. Perhaps twenty of us and a dog, one of my own tribe, but too long an alien, — the dog, I mean. Ko, another of my chair-men, is a man of many mothers. This is his first appearance since he served a term in prison for some devil- ment; and he is joyfully hailed in many ham- lets. This morning he left me on top of the path to put his head in at a door, where the women greeted him: "A Ko," they said, "how we wept when you were in prison. What will you be paying us for those tears?" CARRIERS Mr. Hummel and Miss Sudermann have been ill; Mr. Hummel very ill for a few days. He is a much broken man; not more by this illness than by the long strain. Miss Sudermann has run a low fever for three weeks; was ill in bed for a week, but is now up and around; she still has a temperature of a hundred or so every night. June 24. I am on my way to Olama where there is a ferry across the Nlong River. We came through a beautiful range this morning. The dry season is on, and well into the day the carded mists hang over the forest. On the road, where the women sit beside the food they offer for sale, there are little smoky fires to drive off the gnats ; these little fires in the gray morning smell of autumn at home. Olama himself is a Christian, and that is hard for him to be in his town, where so many trav- elers pass — black and white. The Pattersons are there — have been for nearly a year; and that has been a big help to Olama. Se Menge, my big chair-man, is so amusing and so is little Bama. Yesterday we walked and walked — no food to be had. Of every woman who sat beside her covered kettle we wished to buy, but the food was bad or the price was bad, and my men could not be suited. Toward after- noon Se Menge said to me: "Ah, my friend, it is by the fruits of the spirit that we walk to-day, by them alone — love, joy, peace, long-suffer- ing, particularly long-suffering!" This was meant for a joke, and not for a pious remark. Elat, July 8. My dears, it is raining, dry season notwith- standing. I am rooming with Miss Eick and we are packing for our trip. We are going as far south as the government post of Ambam and a good deal east of that. I did, indeed, see an Elat Communion serv- ice — a most exciting adventure. I saw two hundred and forty-six Christians admitted to the church; a congregation of five thousand I saw; and lots of little babies baptized, looking at Mr. Dager solemnly. Mba Esone came in from Bibia to-day; he tells me that my father and mother have sent me a present — he saw a great box in my room. Eke! What pleasure! And soon I shall be see- ing my dear father and mother, but Mba Esone does not know that; none of the black people know. I feel quite homesick to-night, my dears, with the rain on the roof, a strange roof and a strange bed and all strangers everywhere. This feeling is because I am all day with black people whom I do not know; I always feel lonely when I am not busy with my own work. Mejun, July 17. I am about seventy miles southeast of Elat, in a forlorn little village of the Yemvae tribe. I got in this afternoon after a run through the forest from Ekwen. I left Miss Eick at the crossroads; we shall meet again at the crossing of the Nlobo River. The women here are rather sweet. They have pretty manners with terribly coarse intervals. Their little dress, of an apron of green leaves and a belt of green and white beads, is very pretty. Most of these people have never seen a white woman, and to-night they see one at ease in their own village and eating a forbidden meat — a meat that is taboo for women — be- cause to-day on the path four of our carriers came upon a leopard harrying a gazelle. They chased the leopard and caught the gazelle, so we have fresh meat for supper. Miss Eick is having a good time, I think. The people are devoted to her; the path she is going is an Elat path ; many Christians are in the towns, simple folk who love her. These new people have something to give the black people which we older missionaries have lost — a kind of personal response to their wonder and a pleas- ure in their wonder that is worn away in time. The women laugh at us so much. One clapped her hands with pleasure and said, "The little talk of her and the little voice and all!" There are rats "too much" in this house, and I shall be hearing the "little talk" and the "little voices" and all as soon as I turn out the light. Gracious sakes, my dears, they begin already and b'adun ane hot! 1 Masan, Saturday, July 19. Another rather dreadful town where I shall stay until Monday. When I get into a dreary town like this, I think how satisfied Miss D. would be to see me in surroundings as low as she suspects them to be. Two women have been standing at the door looking at me. I am lying on my cot. They double up with laughter. One says (she is eat- ing), "Here I stand and my plantain cannot find the path to my mouth for wonder!" And when I told them my mother had borne six children, she said, "All with bodies like you? 1 " They are as noisy as people." Not a black one in all?" They surely would have thought themselves cursed with such a brood. Wednesday, July 23. On Monday night we slept in the Ntum town of Wo'o. A large town full of waggish old men, full of interest in sex and the humor of that interest, like old French libertines. The men do not wear the headdress any more, but the women are all coiffed. A very beautiful art, I think, very becoming and curiously modifying to the face, so that the face of an Ntum woman, under its casque of brass studs and bead fringe, bri- dled through the nose with strings of blue or rose beads that pass back of the ear, and strapped across the forehead with a band of beads, — the face of the Ntum woman has a curiously disciplined and softened aspect, a kind of touching submission. I notice this very generally, and Miss E. notices it, too. At this town we had quite a success of curiosity. Miss E.'s bicycle was a great wonder. "And so the white man has white women," cries one silly; " I thought the tribe were just men, men!" I am scribbling beside a wood fire in our little camp. A plantain roasts in the ashes for your child. An animal, some frightened little thing, has just crashed through the underbrush near by. Well, my dears, there is a chicken in the pot with noodles intilt, and on another section of the fire there is a corn custard stewing in an- other pot; and the best we can hope is that neither will be smoked. Bama is wiggling round on his poor old feet. August 3. Three old ladies sit watching me where I lie on my cot. One says, ' 1 So new ! 1 ' Another says, 1 4 So fresh ! " The last says, " Like a thing new-born ! " I am staying under the eaves of a very grand house. There is a kind of porch fenced in with slats of bamboo, and there are twenty pairs of eyes looking through the slats, children on their hands and knees and bigger ones higher up. I am tired of weeks of this. I want to write very particularly of Wednes- day, July 23, for I suppose I shall never pass another such day. We slept Tuesday night near the fork of the Xtem and the Kom, in a very quiet little settlement. We had a little town to ourselves and rested. Walked to a vil- lage in the afternoon, where I had a meeting. On Wednesday we walked through two hours of forest, real forest, but good walking, — a trail, not a path. Lots of elephants had passed within a few days, and we saw the fresh tracks of a gorilla. Afterward we heard from the peo- ple that the gorilla, or more than one, had been seen that day. At about ten o'clock we came into the deserted villages of Mengama. In the palaver house a man sat by a bit of fire. My funny Ebolo in his tattered, his really catas- trophic trousers, found an old harp in a house. He put aside his load, the kitchen load, all pots and pans, — and was a new man. He sang our adventures in a beautiful voice — a mock sen- timental voice, all laughter and bathos, and mellow, mocking tremolo. I loved him for it. It was a purple patch, a ragged purple patch in the garment of the journey. Another stretch of forest and we came into the new clearing of Asok. Later in the day I came back to this place and I will be telling you about it. We sat down in a little leaf hut, for the huts of this big settlement are all hap- hazard as yet, just leafy shelters in the lap of the forest. We boiled eggs and coffee. We were pretty tired. The meek faces of the Ntum women wondered at us from behind their beaded bridles. We walked two miles from here to an old and rather shabby town, Ekome- dum, and here we pitched our tent. In the afternoon I went back to Asok, through the beautiful forest, my dears, and in the beau- tiful afternoon, the beautiful autumnal after- noon of the dry season. In the middle of the leafy disorder of his clearing the headman sat in his little shelter — a young man, heavily braceleted with ivory. There were lots of men in this settlement, and presently many women gathered, all bustled and coiffed, and some rubbed with red powder. Every one was busy: men making furniture for the new town, women knotting little nets, shelling peanuts, grinding corn; and all this individual industry going for- ward in a kind of common gayety. I think I never saw so — how shall I give you an idea of it — so harmonious a scene. As I spoke to these people about the things of God there came a pause in the industry. The tool was arrested. The hands of the women bruising green leaves in wooden troughs and the grinders at the stones were idle. Men laughed with a kind of wonder. One woman flashed with interest behind her mask of purple tattoo and bright beads. Another bridled young thing gazed in a great stillness. I see this thing in my heart like a thing shut in from time and change, and I wish I may never forget it. We spoke of the new Tribe and of its Chief. Mba came to take me home, for he had heard tales of gorillas. The women followed me to say good-bye. They ran ahead shouting about the Commandments — these people dote on Commandments. And these brown creatures headed like flowers were crying to each other: "Don't steal. Don't commit adultery. Don't kill." I have seen so much that is sordid, so much that is vile, that I cannot think when I have seen an hour so unspoiled as this, though in "those days and in those streets," as Gals- worthy says, there must be deeds of horror. In Wo'o, where one felt the horror very near, there was a beautiful creature, a young woman with four red pompons in her headdress. Her body was rubbed with red powder; it was young and fine. There is a bloom of light on the outline of a body so covered, and in the shadows something luminous too. Strange, mor- bid beauty! Lolodorf, Monday, August n. Well, my dears, I am back since Thursday from what I think to have been a good trip, as good as I could have wished. Gone forty-six days, and traveled four hundred and perhaps forty miles. I think I wrote from Ekin, where we camped for three nights; left there on Mon- day morning and were glad to leave, after the ungrateful fashion of transients. We walked until one o'clock the next day, part of the time in the forest, but mostly now on a quite open path, for we were coming out at Ambam, the government post for the Ntum. We slept at Kulezok. We were awfully tired that day. In one of these settlements near Ambam we came on some Efulen people, who were mighty glad to see us, and called one to the other, " Ah Obam, Ah Bilo'o, come and see the faces of home!" Now that we had got back to the neighbor- hood of the white man, the people were ruder but as curious as ever. In the afternoon I went to see Frau Mulling, the wife of the military executive at Ambam, about an hour's walk from the town in which we slept. I sent Mba Esone to tell her that I would call; in such an out of the way part of the world she could not be looking for callers. Ambam is a cluster of bark houses on a long hill ; the houses lie along the crest, a rather noble and leisurely effect. The dwelling house is quite one of the most satisfactory I have seen in Africa — big win- dows let into the bark walls, no curtains, the floor covered with a coarse bamboo matting. Frau Mulling came halfway down the hill to meet me, pretty and friendly. Her husband was away looking after the disorders across the Ntem; he was to be gone the night. She showed me into a room where there was a real bed, my dears, made up with an extravagance of linen. My room, she told me, and was much disap- pointed because I could not stay. She took me part of the way back, "a mile and a bittock," with a soldier to follow us because dusk was closing in and she was afraid of leopards. In the morning Miss Eick and I parted. She went back to Elat by way of Mendim. I slept two nights on the Ambam road, and on the third day I turned off on to a by-path. From Ambam on I slept in towns where Efulen Station has placed black evangelists and teachers. These black men are doing good work, poor dears, and are homesick. Yes, and sometimes hungry. From Akon Etye I made a long day to Okon, met friends there, and the evangelist's little laughing daughter used to be in school at Efulen. Long after the eggs were bought and water was brought from the spring, and I had bathed and eaten and held a meeting, the evan- gelist and his wife and little Ngoneman and I talked the talk of friends. Metu'u m'Obam was the brother of Zua and helped me run away with her long ago. I lay on my cot under my net; the lantern lit the little shelter and 3ii outside was the night. The mother and the father talked the talk of real people and the little girl laughed and then was wise, because she is only partly a little girl and partly a little woman. She is being nicely brought up and is not to marry until she is marriageable, and then only by her own choice. She has no little com- panions among the Ntum; she is quite a mis- sionary's little girl. I got hungry, and we ate some fish that had been baked in a leaf. And so to bed. From Okon to Nyabet is mostly by way of the forest, a beautiful path. In a village by the way I had a half-hour session with a proud blacksmith — the Ntum are great blacksmiths — and we parted with tears, or nearly. "We men," said he, "love to tell tales in the palaver house, and when we are telling our tales, where is the ring I will be showing the other men to prove that the white woman and I, we are friends?" "If you speak of tales," said I, "I love to tell a tale myself, and where is the present you will be giving me to show my friends when I say that I and the blacksmith from Akumbetye, we are friends?" More of such gentle hints, followed by an exchange of keepsakes. Brass for ivory, and some magic in the ivory, too. THE HUNTER When we came out of the forest at about three o'clock, into the sunny upland valley of Nyabet, I met a happy man who had killed a monkey. He carried the most beautiful cross- bow I have ever seen, and he carried it with the most noble gesture. 'T is a grand thing to kill a monkey; you rush home in a little wind of victory. I bought that crossbow the next day. I spent Sunday at Mesamba. On Monday we cut up through the forest to Mfenda, and from there to Nkotoven, all day in bilik and bekotok — that is, old deserted clearing; nothing so hard to go through. And it rained. I got into Nkotoven, Bululand, at five o'clock. "Zamo Ntem," I call, and old Zamo sits up in her house. "That little voice," says Zamo; "where have I heard that little voice before?" "Zamo!" And Zamo comes out slowly, blinking, and then quickly, and puts her arms around me and cries on my sleeve, because old Minkoe Ntem, her sister and my friend, is dead. And they told her at Efulen that I was gone beyond the seas. The owner of that little voice is em- braced by many old friends. Zamo cannot sit down to chat; she has guests to feed. She leaves plantains in the kettle for my carriers, and is off to beg a chicken for her dear child. Poor old woman — she goes far for her chicken ; at ten I put out the light and go to sleep, Zamo still away. The young wives of her husband lie down and sleep, too. They are Christians, children of the childless Zamo. She is a wonderful per- son, with hundreds of converts to fill her heart. In the morning we parted and I had a chicken all my own. She was going to show me a great piece of path, but the old legs got tired. She went too far for the chicken. That day we went through the Mebem bilik, — not bad. Ate fine pawpaws in a little clearing about a palm tree. Spent the night at Minkan in our own territory, where the people came far to hear us through the night and the rain, by the light of reed torches. I think I shall never see old Zamo again. THE END