Part Three — The Mail from the Beach

Part Three THE MAIL FROM THE BEACH Libreville, West Africa, July 10, 1908. I write you from Libreville on the Gaboon River in the French Congo; rather, I write from Baraka, the mission station among the Mpongwe people. I have been transferred hither from the Kamerun because I speak French, and there is need of such a French-speaking missionary here. Very charming it is at this station, in the old house among the old trees looking out upon the river and beyond this to the sunset. And very encouraging it is to a missionary from a young station to see these Mpongwe Christians, the fruit of half a cen- tury of missionary labor, who have come to be a people of pleasant and orderly life, living in their gray bamboo houses after no mean fashion, with books upon their shelves and clean linen upon their beds. Some of the houses are papered and some have cement floors ; in some there are pictures of miscellaneous royalty upon the walls and fading photographs of the family when they were bride and groom ; in the little gardens flow- ers run from the sea wind. Of a Sunday the little church is full of a decent congregation who have come up to the House of God with pleasure and with pride, dressed, I suspect, with a good deal of conscious vanity, and observing solemn rules of conduct with great good cheer and complacency. Do not despise this joy in form and order; the house, after having been swept, is furnished after a new fashion that passeth not away, and how shall the owner conceal his delight? I call at the houses of the Christians and go about to the village prayer-meetings just for the pleasure of seeing these comely Mpongwe women move about in their enriched circumstance, — them- selves enriched in mind and heart and spirit beyond all counting. To me the windows, open to the river; the great white beds under their white curtains and their covers of red and white applique; the tables dressed with a white cloth, where the wife eats with the husband, — all these are pledges of hope for the poor Bulu woman, for the Ngumba woman, for the little dwarf woman in the hidden places of the forest, and for the Fang woman who lives in the water- ways back of us as the dweller in Third Avenue lives back of the dweller in Fourth. Baraka has its potent past. One may not forget the women of long ago who were busy at its inception, in hoops, — if, indeed, they stooped to vanity, — with curls back of their ears or smooth hair drawn over them. Some of these are long dead, some of them are in America, some are still among us, — these last so much a part of our present that we hardly associate with them a past of so quaint an aspect. But the past survives intact in the memory of the old Mpongwe women. "Mrs. Walker was very kind," says one, in that soft English which she learned of Mrs. Walker in her youth. "She was tender-hearted. When the work was badly done she would say to us little girls, 'Child, child, sit down! ' — and we liked that. Mrs. Bushnell was kind too — ah, Mrs. Bushnell! And when the work was badly done we must always do it again for Mrs. Bushnell. When we grew older we knew that she was right. Mrs. Bushnell taught us to work!" And Sarah, ironing Miss Nassau's dress while she talks to me, dreams over the days when Miss Nassau was a young woman on Corsico Island. On that account we sit still for a little. The sound of the tide comes in at the open door and the flowers in the little garden run from the sea wind. Everywhere in the open is the exceed- ing brightness of day; and I think of how, in America, God has laid a hand upon Mrs. Bush- nell's eyes. There are very wicked women among the Mpongwe, and there are saints, too, — I feel the quaintness of this word and its difficulty. But there is a sort of woman for whom it is just a common term — who must be so called or lack a name; I mean kind old women who have be- friended others; who have smiled so long out of their kind eyes that there is a perpetual glimmer of smile in the ultimate dimness; who have moved so softly about the sick and dying that they come down the village street as still, in their bare brown feet, as evening air. In the gardens of their minds righteousness and peace grow together, with many homely healing herbs for the wounded of their people. Some such have I seen in the village about Baraka, which is pretty much of a heavenly vision in the eyes of a missionary from Ngumba. July 12. You will be glad, since you care for my com- fort, to know that we are pleasantly housed at Baraka. We live in an old house, among the scattered Mpongwe villages. Three miles of a road that follows the shore of the Gaboon Es- tuary brings us to Libreville, one of the largest of the West Coast settlements. Here are over one hundred white people, and more than twenty women. These are French people, and some English traders. I cannot hope to give you a sense of how metropolitan we feel ourselves to be. Indeed, I think that only a "bush" per- son like myself experiences the full flavor of our excessive urbanity. The Mpongwe people themselves are extraor- dinary in their grace and finish. Who can say for how many generations they have been in contact with the trader, and the American mis- sion was busy among them as many as seventy years ago. They are people of a fastidious in- stinct, the nicest sort of instinct for true gen- tility; and there is nothing grotesque in their very modified aspect or in the modifications of their manner of life. Many of these old Chris- tian women have an air of distinction for which one can hardly account — quite the "grand manner"; and the women of the tribe generally are graceful with a grace not at all primitive, — a sophisticated, almost a morbid, grace. There has been, and there continues to be, a mingling of races here, so that we have to do with many mulattoes, little mulatto children in the school, poor pretty mulatto girls who want to be good against all the tides of their blood. Nothing is simple here, goodness least of all. Well, my dears, I am to remain here. The Fords have no immediate intention of going home, and one must approve the earnestness of their devotion to this place, which must be closed if they go. And as for me, I shall go in for the work with all the heart I can bring to it. I don't know what the work means, what it may come to mean; it is foreign to me. But I must manage to put myself into it somehow, and then we shall see. July 27. This afternoon I studied the language; and then I looked up and saw our settlement on its ridge rising between the sea and the sweet roll- ing country, and everywhere the light of the late afternoon. This place is not magic or strange, but extraordinarily rural, — yes, even magically rural. The street that runs by the water, and the street back of this and upon the higher land of Libreville, — with its little houses under the great mango trees and trees of strange blossoms and palm trees, the little houses painted brightly and standing in bright flowers, — are rural but not in any common sense ; there is a strangeness. There is no sugges- ts tion of the forest, but there is a suggestion of the primeval animal. I think this is as true as if the town, with its little streets beneath its great trees, were the jungle, and the poor pretty yellow girls that look at you from under the thatched eaves were leopardesses. There for generations the animal passions of men have been exceedingly busy, and everywhere is the melancholy of license. Don't tell me that all the white men whose children run naked in the streets were minded to father such broods. I suppose the air of this place is heavy with self- disgust and a thousand remorses — a thousand thousand. This is an old settlement. Baraka, July 29. I am conducting a French examination in the little schoolhouse. About seventy scholars come regularly, but to-day one class of six is held for examination. They are writing tensely with their chins above their slow hands. The eldest may be thirteen; there is one girl in the crowd. The teacher, Joseph, speaks better French than I do — and is handsomer too. He is very much in the flower of youth — the son of a woman still comely in her sixties. For the minute the yoke of the French verb is heavy. From outside there come in sweet airs by the six windows and the open doors. We see the gray water and the green trees moving in the wind, and the sunny places where the mown grass is bleaching and where Igue, the evangelist, is washing his clothes. He is our preacher, and a very timid person; he was a slave, and is perhaps of dwarf origin. There are twenty-eight girls in the school. Six of these are mulattoes or the children of white men and mulatto women. One is like a flower — her grace is excessive ; some of the black ones are handsome, with a more robust and happy charm. July 31. Another examination — of the seniors, eight in number. One is a mulatto girl. We are bound to take them seriously if we take their race seriously. They read in French well enough — with a soft slur. Any one who doubts that Rodin's ''Thinker" is thinking should look at the feet of these poor children: all the tenses of the verb aller are trodden out of the wine- press by their feet. September 10. The prettiest dress of the Mpongwe woman is a cloth drawn up under the arms, a scarf on the shoulders, and a handkerchief folded over the coiled hair in a high stiff fold set well up on the head, rather like a child's idea of a crown. There is a great fancy for purples and lavenders set off with shades of rose and red and a sudden keen note of gilt. With black there will be a touch of most delicious bright green. A cloth and a scarf worn by a woman of beautiful ges- ture — and a Gabonnaise is always that — have a certain mutable charm; the movements of the body, the wind that blows from the sea, — these renew and display the folds of the gar- ment so that the eye is intrigued. There are two women, mother and daughter, who wear dresses of a type all by themselves. You would think the mother must be old, but she does not look so; Ntyuakero's widow she is — he who was the minister here and who died of the sleeping sickness. Her name is Osuka. She is a slight woman with a thin, thoughtful face, and a look of tender brooding and that fixed sweetness which is so often — perhaps al- ways — a fruit of sorrow. When I go to see her, she comes from the spring — where she washes — in her straight black dress, with her black handkerchief above her little thin face; and as she sits under the eaves of her house, smiling at her guest, I see her a type — she is so much a widow, so much the little hard-working bereft woman who cries before she sleeps at night in her lonely house. Her daughter is Joseph's wife, and that is to be proud and happy. She dresses very sweetly, in lavenders and rose colors, falling rather scant on her thin young body except for a sort of congestion of gathers between the shoulders. Anyuregule braids her rather long hair in little braids; these fall straight and thick from under the stiff folds of her handkerchief down her temples and beside her delicate cheeks, with an effect of something angular and Egyptian, very stimulating to the imagination. She is good and happy, opulent, quite cheerfully vain, I fancy; and yet, in her slight face, that is so gracious and so sweetly young, there is a shadow of latent melancholy — the daughter of Osuka's melancholy. I write this out because I want to try to make you see it, my dears, so that things will begin to be real to you a little. I wonder if the house is real, — the little old house under its thatch, with cocoanut trees standing high about it, rustling in the wind, and other denser trees, — a cinnamon tree at the back; the flamboyant tree putting out its first great red blossoms be- tween the house and the church; the breadfruit trees with their gross leaves and their great green globes; the swaying, crowded plumes of the bamboo between us and the water? So many missionaries have sat in this same room, and have gone their many ways. September 16. At two o'clock of an afternoon at Baraka Station the twenty-nine little girls will be in the work-house. The wind from the sea will be rushing in between the upright bamboo poles of the walls, and shafts of yellow daylight will be falling on the brown clay floor. There will be the sound of the tide in the Gaboon Estuary from down the hill and across the meadows. On the three long tables, that Mr. Hickman made from broken boxes, the work will be spread out. On the first, clean linen, washed out under the eaves, and dried in the extreme sunlight, and brought in to be mended. At the middle table there will be ironing and beyond this the sewing. Sara, the matron, presides over the mending, in her blue dress, brown feet thrust into slippers, filling her end of the room with the comfort of her presence, her true goodness, her kindness, — that something which tempts one in weak moments to weep on her shoulder. Ma Sara is not very firm; every culprit has a chance with her. Anyuregule directs the little girls at the ironing-board. She is the wife of the school- teacher— Ma Sara's daughter-in-law — and mis- tress of the laundry. The sewing-table is at the end of the room beside the platform. Part of the platform is enclosed as a storeroom; the walls of the en- closure are whitewashed and the door is painted a delicious vivid green. There is a green box seat on the platform, and above this the window opens to the mango trees, and the fall of the hill and the meadows, and the line of houses by the sand, and the estuary, and Parrot Island far away like a purple stain on the silver of the water. Mrs. Ford sits by the window directing the sewing. This is a tame phrase for the pas- sion of her performance. She is calling up Industrial Work out of the empty places. Like Wot an, she holds mysterious councils with the earth ; and she is deeply wise about fiber plants. But to-day she is overseeing the making of many-colored coats out of patches — for our friends send us patches, little patchwork cloths and big ones, too; all that end of the room is bright with patches. Out of the brilliant cotton stuffs to be had in this country the little girls make dresses and coats with pockets. Mrs. Ford hopes that we may find a market for certain typical Gaboon work — red and white appliqu£, and bed- spreads of typical violent combinations of red, white, blue, and yellow, dear to the hearts of the Mpongwe. Says Ma Sara, "the designs are finer than formerly.' ' This is progress on the West Coast. A wore comes in with white linen in her arms that are round and brown. She and Anyur6 are perhaps fifteen, and are permitted to keep their hair when the younger girls are shorn. They are no longer children ; already they move with the excessive grace of the Gabonnaise. Their hair is parted from the forehead to the nape of the neck and twisted in coils above the ears. These young girls have a great pride of appearance, I never saw either of them disor- dered ; and to see the slim Anyure, — who is a mulatto, — in her scant pink dress, the shadowy coils of her hair dark above the little oval of her face, is to smile and sigh. There are perhaps six mulattoes, and others, I suppose, who have forgotten strains of white blood ; for this is an old settlement — we live on the forest's edge, but we are not a forest people ; we are ' ' The Wise Ones ' ' — wise for gen- erations — with the knowledge of good and evil. As I write, the children fold away the clean linen and the sewing; it is four o'clock. They will work in the open — planting in their gar- dens, or cutting the quick-growing grasses — until sunset. Then will come the evening meal, which will have been cooked and will be served by those of their number who are the cooks for this week. There will be for supper broiled dried fish and cakes of cassava, the inevitable kank or bread of this African world. In the bright eve- ning air the little cooks will place the nondescript plates and the marmalade jars that serve for water. (Too bad that you cannot know how grand this is.) The little girls will sit on the benches by the tables; they will ask a blessing, all murmuring together words that I do not yet understand. By now it will be dark — with the sudden dark that leaps out of the east on this country. The lanterns burn above the feast; the little girls laugh and talk and squabble. Presently each will spread her grass mat on the floor of the sleeping-room, each will wrap her in a cotton cloth, and lying down she will sleep. Mrs. Ford will lie down to sleep, too, but first must be thinking — if only she could produce fiber! Or, will there be a chance to sell baby clothes at mission meeting if the girls make them? And many other exciting speculations 1 66 she entertains. But if it is Saturday she will think, I suppose, that her twenty-nine little girls — only two of whom are fifteen and most of whom are no more than ten — have washed for the household; have cooked for themselves and some thirty boys; have sewed for them- selves and for sale; have dug and planted; have thanked God for what they have eaten; and now lie safe asleep under a sure and decent shelter in the midst of many dark and terrible things. She must think of those other girls who have gone out in former times to establish per- manent families and who come sometimes to see her whom they call mother; and she must think also of those others who went out and may not come back for shame, — she thinks of those with tears, and prepares for them a place of repentance. For they do often have such need. Here is the end of my letter and nothing about reading, writing, or other such mystic arts — which yet the little girls practice. But Mrs. Ford's obsession of industrial work is a domina- tion. I have been too wrought upon to write of anything more esoteric; and somehow I think that to earn the kank one eats is more tremen- dous and more adventurous than to read or write a recipe for cooking it. September 17. I see that I am much needed here. The young Scotch trader, Martin, when he leaves of an evening, says that he " will be getting down the road," and if I will be just getting down the road there will be plenty doing. I begin to have a little Mpongwe — enough to make love with; I begin to know poor simple bodies — the old — the sick — the bereaved ; I begin to have greet- ings from under the eaves of the houses — and friendly waving of arms. Yesterday I sat with three women in a little hut as neat as wax; there were little stools on the earth floor, and a little fire that made bright lights on some china dishes that were set out on leaves, to re- ceive the food that was cooking in a little iron pot. One of the women was an albino, looking at me sweetly out of her poor pink-lidded eyes; the other two were black. I said, "I am out hunting friends," and they told me, with a kind of eager gravity, "You will find them. O be denga! " It was so kindly said that I was happy. I feel reassured and more myself. What looks to be a case of sleeping sickness has developed in one of our families lately — a child, who used at first to give me her hand, looking at me out of heavy eyes, but whose little spirit is too weighed down with heaviness in these last days to look out of the body at all. This is sad and dreadful to see. She has the characteristic symp- toms — the swellings, the untimely sleep, es- pecially the sleep that comes with the act of eating. September 24. When I was here three years ago there was a Frenchwoman from the Ogowe very ill; she died later in France. Her husband is here now for a little rest, which he very much needs, poor fellow; he is in a great state of nerves. For all his nervous manner he is interesting, often look- ing at one with that attention which is one of the marks of an open mind. He is argumenta- tive, too, but about vital matters, so that one is willing. He reminds me of Italians I have known, — not in surface aspect, but in construction and in manner. He is from La Dr6me. I am glad he is here, though it pains me to note his extreme nervous tension. September 30. The Frenchman is still here. I shall miss him when he goes, because he talks about anything that I please to have him, and lets me talk, too. Different tribes of birds speak different dia- lects outside; the boys call out to one another at work; the mangoes hang in pale yellow clus- ters down the foliage of the great trees; some- times one nearest ripe falls with a soft thud; al- ways there is the sound of the surf, that is less and more and less again, but never still. I feel a sweet laziness in the last recesses of me, and that is good to feel. Almost always here I feel like working out a salvation of my peace, as if I were constrained to create something dynamic in this place of sleep and evil dreams. October 7. The night is so magically lovely that you wonder why Henry James writes as he does. Has every one the sense that every moonlight night — every single one — must hold some wine of a particularly personal happiness or be accounted waste? The thwarted ego, with lip on the empty glass, would bite a piece out of the rim. I hope this pleases you — I write like this because I have just learned how; but it does n't seem natural yet, and I must still laugh. The Frenchman — I mean the missionary — is quite extraordinary. He says he is a work- man, but that may be just a modern form of brag. "L'ouvrier," he says, "est si peu inter- essant," that I must not so much as think of him. Under his helmet, his mocking face, with a beard like a big T across it, is most amusing; but at night, standing before me in the middle of the big room he talks of sad and terrible things with furious gestures: of old age that rots and rots, of renunciation that is fruitless, of the inexplicable dealings of God with the appalled and bewildered soul — until I hang dizzy over the edge, and the other missionaries — but no; it is, it seems, a game for two. They have no part in "our panic, our pangs, and our doom." October 14. The days go like this : I need n't get up much before seven, so I don't. Breakfast at something like a quarter past, and after this prayers, — I mean personal, white man's prayers; and we take turns. By half-past eight I am in school. I look after the two advanced classes. I have divided them, and Joseph with an apprentice assists me. The advanced class studies in the afternoon, and I have nothing to do with after- noon sessions; Joseph and Mr. Ford attend to them. I have six little assistants who manage the lower classes, each in his own fashion, which is only in a measure modified by mine. There must be about fifty little codgers, boys and girls not much in love with school and not quick in beginning, — in which they differ from the Bush people, — but quite surprisingly intelligent. We struggle along until noon, not so badly. The little teachers love to beat the little schol- ars, but they are not let. Teaching comes to be a dull business. These are my six assistants : Kidney, grandson of an English sea captain, and about sixteen, I should fancy, — slow and sad, not at all a virile type, quite a mulatto type; Madiba, a Benga boy, good stuff, about fifteen; Mbueke, a little younger and too, too clever, — after all, he may be no more than twelve. His teaching is a series of barks — you would say an exasperated collie herding silly sheep. Alexander, so lazy that I can't afford to write about him; Japoma, who teaches mysti- cally, all knowledge a whispered secret. I never caught him in the act; he floats with his class in a windless calm; I can't fancy how the transfer is effected, but of a Friday, when they are called up to deliver, they open their little hands and there is the button. Then there is Rebieno. These last two cannot be twelve years old. Rebieno controls and teaches thirteen children ; he would love to knock them about, and missing this, he bullies them by sheer mental force. He is small and some of them are bigger, some older, but he quietly and systematically grinds them down. Driving them to the water, he holds them under until they come up with a jolly good mouthful, and they need n't gasp either. Out of the tail of his astute eye he measures my approval or dis- approval, and he can change tack without order. His eye on me is not a sly one; it is the eye of a truly clever, disinterested, ruthless subordinate. This is my teaching force, and sometimes I call sweet Anyure, who is a member of this class and whose little womanly presence diffuses some- thing very tender and refreshing to ease your friend's sense. This is the school. We read French as soon as we know all our letters, and Mrs. Ford has evolved a thoroughly practical system. We come to be quite glib, and would compare very creditably with a class of French peasantry in certain respects: not in speaking French, of course; but hardly any one in the world can write as beautifully as some of us do. Only, here is none of the passion for learning which trembles in the bush hearts, nor any hungering and thirsting after God. Quite like a school at home. The matter of age makes an element of the difference; one could not look for such ardors in such young hearts ; but neither do the young men in this place seem to care. You can think if this would make a difference to missionaries! These are the things I think about more and more, and with less and less tranquillity. When I go to bed at night, I think, "To-morrow something must happen"; and every day I think this more and more until the thought and the desire for the bush work is being crowded by the will to make good here. November 8. To-day I went to see an old Christian who lived as far on the other side of Libreville as we do on this side. Hardly any one was stirring in the settlement as early as half-past three. I went by the sea, under cocoanut palms that have never killed any one yet, though they might as well as not, — out onto the point where Ngeza lives in his house that is more than thirty years old. A plank house to which Ngeza must climb by steps which must be steep to his old bones. He was looking through his glass at the German steamer just in. Lots of beautiful nets hang on his veranda. In his house it is cool and dusty; mirrors, of course, on the walls — one clear and still gilt, the other gray and the frame sad with years — these reflect the dark old floor and the slim-legged chairs that begin to lose their stuffing through their leather covers. The sound of the sea is always in that house, and the soft passing of the sea wind. Many things we spoke of, but most of Mr. Murphy. A missionary, my dears, long since gone back to America, but of an eloquence it seems and a goodness not to be compared. So that at this end of the long day Ngeza can only sigh and say, "Murphy was Murphy"! "Now," says Ngeza, in the sad fashion of old men, "there are so few of us left — God knows best. But at night, when I think of the people of Gaboon and that the soul is so small in their eyes, I weep — at night on my bed." I listen to this and under- stand it. Murphy, it seems, should have stayed; Ngeza says so. Presently we kneel down and Ngeza prays — none of your personal familiar addresses, but ascriptions of praise to the Al- mighty and pleadings for mercy. His voice fills the old house. Going home I meet all sorts of people, — nuns I meet — as many as ten, some young sweet little ones — and they return my salu- tation in friendly fashion, which is the first time ever they did, poor dears. Two ladies I meet in a dog-cart — young women with thin dark faces and a careful prettiness — they do not salute. Many men I meet and they salute. I salute no matter who — I am sick of the lack of humanity here, and glad because the nuns were friendly to-day. November 1 1. To-day being Wednesday I was taking the little girls for their bath in the sea. We were winding along the path across the meadows, with the busyness of ants and the gayety of grasshoppers, when we came to water in the way; then you should have seen my little pro- cession of ants scatter and run frantically about — all to preserve their precious larvae ; I found that I was the larvae. Dubious consultations about "Mademoiselle" and her good shoes, until Ngya — a most practical young person of perhaps twelve — tucked her dress about her waist and came to me. "I am going to carry you," says Ngya in a rather severe and bullying tone, and turned her back. Perhaps they are more loving than one would guess. Such play as they have on the beach, such frolicking of little brown bodies and little yellow bodies. If one were here for just the pleasure of letting go with them, it would be fun. But one is here so necessarily for discipline — that being the great- est service one can do them. Coming home the stronger ones did, indeed, carry me over pud- dles, on a chair of crossed hands, and there were great giggles because "Mademoiselle" was so light. November 15. Yesterday, in the late afternoon, I went to see Ekande, a little cozy woman who is always busy by her open door. A mat will be spread on her clay floor and from her knees her bright-colored sewing falls onto the mat. Last evening we talked together — she was going with me a piece of the way home — about her son that was born twenty-five years ago. His father, she said, was a Dane, once a sailor, but in her day a trader. He took her away from Gaboon to Kamerun. They lived together seven years; he spoke Mpongwe. She was happy with him, she said. "White men are kinder to us than our Mpongwe men." Then he went away with the little boy; they were to have come back but never did. Now she is married to Magago, who is, I suppose, less kind. One of the French mis- sionaries here, who was a trader before he be- came a missionary, says that the white men become very sincerely attached to their black women. I understand that, and I understand, too, that a black woman may gain by such a connection; but no one has explained to me yet how a Caucasian — with his racial prejudice in favor of the purity of his women — can cheer- fully breed daughters of whom he may never hope that they will be chaste. Another thing, the black woman under contract to a white man continues to bear black children. The white men are obliged to submit to this, which a black man of this tribe need not tolerate. A black husband — well, never mind. This is not a particularly simple business. Now I begin a little to get beneath the manner here. A few days ago I saw a little child with the sleeping sickness, — further gone than when I saw her last, poor little girl, — sleeping under a blanket, her little limbs sprawled out. In her waking moments she suffers mute fears; she may n't say what she fears, only her frightened eyes hunt and find. Is n't it too sad! February 5, 1909. Such excitements! To-night we took the little girls fishing. At some seasons of the year the women fish with torches — wading thigh-deep in the water and spreading a cloth between four of them for a net. For such a grand bat as this the little girls started out with lanterns and a great clamor under the moon. We were to catch as good fish as there are in the sea — and yet none thought to bring a basket for the catch. So we borrowed from a cottage on the beach a brass kettle — a big one, of course. Clothes were shed like dead leaves — the lanterns danced above the water — groups of little girls rose and fell in the lights held high by others — shrill heralds ran up the beach to tell us that there were fish to be had. There was all the agitation of a great slaughter, and when at last Mrs. Ford blew her whistle and the lights came slowly up the beach, we must look in the kettle, — two little minnows and some seaweed! Everything can be accounted for, and this is the way to account for the good fish that are still in the sea. From where I scribble in my room, that is open every way but one, I hear the little girls scrapping as they go to bed. Still, it was a pleasant party. February 9. This morning I woke when the day was still dim and strange. The people in a town a quarter of a mile away had been dancing all night, and the sound of their drumming was curiously de- liberate in the dawn. I have never heard this rhythm before, — sad, my dears, to break the heart, desperate and deliberate at once. A meas- ure of three, then two, then three, the last three falling away from the even deliberation of the first two measures, with a movement toward abandon — a very curious and disquieting ef- feet. One wonders what was the dance, after the long night of dancing, at that disillusioning hour and to that cynical rhythm. To-morrow I will have my letters; for that I am happy. Yesterday little J ana, the child with the sleeping sickness, died, and that was well. To-day I was with the poor weary mother, and she thanked me sweetly for the times I had come to see her. Was n't that touching of her? The last time I saw the child she was lost to childish semblance; but a matter of two weeks ago I happened in while her mother was rub- bing her with oil. She was sleeping, her little face an untroubled young mask, and the long angular lines of her young body very sweet and touching. Two women moved her about; she had little sudden rigors, gestures of angular childish grace. I beg your pardon if it is wrong to talk about this. But it was extraordinary to see a human creature so lost as an individual, so lost to the senses, so unresponsive, and so much at peace, so like a faint drawing of a little child on an Egyptian wall — and still beautiful. February 28. Here is the beginning of a letter to my family, at the close of a Sunday, after I had come in from a visit with Owango Ingo, poor little crea- ture, who cried into her dress because she wants to be good and yet evil is present with her. She loves her husband, and he pretty well spoiled her, with chains for her neck and gold rings for her fin- gers and carpets everywhere in her plank house and a forest of velvet furniture on the carpets. She is a little person, very black, with large eyes and a pointed chin. He has other wives. She thought lately that she was losing him, so she went about making a charm. Very wise people of this most gifted tribe gave her a magic lotion. She was to rub it on her little pointed face and so be irresistible. Her husband got word of the med- icine-making, but not of its purport. He took it to be an injury, some powerful attempt on his well-being. So Owango Ingo is driven out. The affair comes to trial before King Morris and she is acquitted. The bottle is thrown into the sea. Owango goes back to the carpets and the furniture, but she cries into her dress because she has departed from good and followed after evil. " Satan,' 1 says she, quite without prompting, "is very powerful." This is by way of instruc- tion to Mademoiselle, who cannot be expected to know, and who recognizes that poor little Owango speaks from an obscure and evil ex- perience. One would not care to compete with an Mpongwe woman along this line. The women of this tribe have a secret society of great power and influence where the men's secret societies have become obsolete, — the Njemba — and they are up to all sorts of devilment. Altogether the Mpongwe women who are not Christian are creatures of a black and sophisticated evil. March 15. I sat a long time this afternoon with Robbie Boardman, the blind Mpongwe man who is an evangelist to the Fang. He is back for a few days because his brother has just died. The Boardmans are not like any other family; they are long and lank and light-colored, with an instinct for the things of the white man and something like our mode of thought. Their mother or father, I can't think which, was an American negro. Tragic things must always be happening in the Boardman family; their weaknesses hang about them like shadows. The mother, an educated woman, died a drunk- ard, and Augustus, too, was a drunkard. But Robbie sits in the windy doorway of his sister Martha's cottage, laughing and chatting, his hands between his knees, and in the silence which he keeps while another speaks, his chin up, and the promise of a whistle on his face. He seems just ready to whistle, the little soft whistle of a man at an intricate and satisfactory job, but he never truly whistles. Only, some- times, when he is pleased with what you have said or with himself for having caught your thought, he laughs. His English is without ef- fort and good. Mr. Wright says he is often despondent, and I should fancy that his sensi- bilities are overdeveloped. When I went to see Oduka, a woman of the Shekiani and a mean person in the eyes of a true Mpongwe, in her little hut she sat at meat with her two little boys. Each had a bit stool, and on another stool between them were set out clean bright dishes, all in gaudy colors. Here were boiled plantains and red crabs quite mixed up and lost as to legs. In another dish there was a spiced gravy of wild mango nut. One boy gave me a stool and sat himself upon a bit of firewood, and I too had a bite to eat. So we live, you see, not without the dinner of herbs and some love withal. March 16. I feel — what you are often tempted to ex- press — your dissatisfaction with my circum- stance. And yet, my dears, take account of this: your friend actually insures the welfare of a school of nearly eighty little children. What more would you ask for me, or I for myself, than that I should be so practically serviceable? Think once how I stand on a platform, like a personage. Little boys go to wash their hands to please me. And once, when a little boy was absent "because he had no cloth," I sent for him to come, anyway, which he did, a little jacket tied by the sleeves about his middle. This is power. When they cough I say, "You must stop coughing," and they do. When one has injured another I make him say, "Forgive me," which he hates to do, but does. And then I tell the injured party that he is unmanly, so that no one is too complacent or comfortable for long. March 20. Mr. Martin, poor dear, is ordered to a trad- ing-post in the river, quite a lost place and "sunken from the healthy breath of morn." This makes us sad. But Mr. X. has taken his mulatto woman and his little children home, which is a great wonder. Now I can forget those little deep-eyed children that so grieved me. They are boys, and that is better. It is the cross-breed girls who grieve me most, who are most adrift. The black men do not pick their wives from these, who are too frail, they think, for hardy uses. They are bad investments. Where may they cast anchor, these poor yellow girls who drift between black men and white? March 27. Anyur6 and Awor6 walk and talk together in the moonlight; they talk secrets, as they should. Anyure's little head is flower-like; she carries her chin high and looks about her with smiling eyes. A wore is very dark and, of late, womanly; she is pretty, too. To-night in the moonlight I see some silver beads on her neck; they quite shine. Her black dress is figured with gay flowers; her hair comes down from under her flowered kerchief in close-set, stiff little twists. These young girls seem very dear and sweet to me; I would like to be intimate with them. But I am not intimate with any one but Miagomori and we keep this intimacy a secret. Little Miagomori, — who must always hitch up his trousers when he stands to recite — one should be grateful, I suppose. He is perhaps nine years old; he smiles more than is reasonable and this distinguishes him. I took care of him the day his little sister was buried; that is, I found him in the rear of the proces- sion to the grave, dragging reluctant feet and terribly oppressed. I took him by his little cold hand and led him away out of the valley of the shadow. That was the beginning of our inti- macy, as holding of hands has been before now. March 29. Mr. Martin is not to go to the trading-post up river, as seemed likely. I am glad. When I think how men are cast away here, and why, I am sick, — when I think of young Pierce at his lonely post between Cape St. John and Benito, walking his veranda at night because he cannot sleep; and of Mr. Barrow, who told me that, in the times of his troubles with the Spanish officials at Eloby, he used sometimes, from very loneliness and desolation, to weep. He looked for me to explain a thing so extraor- dinary. April 4. Sometimes, when Mr. Martin comes in at our supper time, I try to note in him — for you — what there is that so pleases and re- freshes us, but I can't fasten it. Oniy there comes in with him some breath of honest old- country living, customs and modes of thought, canny old phrases, Scotch crotchets, — and all this through the medium of ruddy radical youth. It is beautiful to see how perfectly he has the racial gift of non-committal. "Til not be caring if I do," says young Martin in the limit of acquiescence. I never hear him tell a tale of a crooked deal — and there are many such tales — but that closes in this fashion, "Well, I won't be saying that I mightn't do the same myself — but I won't be saying that I am a rogue neither." He has a passion for claiming every worker of iniquity for a brother, but he will not be written down a rogue. I cannot tell you how many times young Martin has turned on us a lowering young face that waits on our word that he is no rogue. He had no home letters on the last steamer and he has cast his family off — quite a feat, since there are hordes of them. April 8. My dears, I salute you. Is it well on the top of the world where you live? There will be blossoms there on familiar trees that are green, above rivers that are better than all the waters of this estuary. Yet here there is a great blessing and gift — it is the gift of vision. Being well out of the woods one sees the forest, and you; and the "happy highways" where you go shine plain and clear to me. On moonlight nights like these, when the world hangs all bright in the firmament, I see you on the gilded half, the very heart of all that fire and light. You can surely never see yourselves so. It is truly a fine sight, worth a penny a peep, and as good as an Easter egg with a glass end. I begin to be almost glib in Mpongwe. April 10. The French steamer, with her pompous en- try, makes me sick. You would suppose from her fashion of ploughing up the whole estuary, and her swelling way of coming to anchor, that she must be out of breath with news, but no, she can't produce more than you could carry in a leaf. April 17. Great excitements to-day — Mrs. Good arrived and the Johnsons! And imagine that after her long absence Mrs. Good still speaks Mpongwe. April 20. To-day in a village a little girl was very friendly to me — nay, more. She asked me to marry her. She was perhaps five years old ; she had on a little dress in my honor, but it did n't button. She discovered very much about me in a very short time — a gold tooth well back in my mouth because I was so indiscreet as to laugh. She asked me, Had I borne? and I said, No, I had never borne, but went about the towns hunting other women's little children. She asked me, in a most searching manner, Did I love them? An extraordinary question from such a source. She patted me with her little hand and said she would marry me. Presently, a neighbor coming into the yard, she put her face to a crack in the railing about the veranda and called out, "You must see this white per- son who has come with a hat and an umbrella.' ' Funny little black baby! Ntyua, June 20. We left Baraka on Friday at ten, in the little sailboat Evangeline. A dead calm all the after- noon, and our men rowing through the still gray world, though now and again a school of fish made its multitudinous commotion. Five Fang we had for crew, and my little Osala who was much awed by the world and his travels. He is a Shekiani and not at all self-assured. I had explained that, if I permitted him this journey, he might find himself in a way to starve and must be prepared to do so pleasantly. He said yes, he would. The part of Spartan youth, for which, as you see, he had signed, was early called for. Food was short at Baraka, and Osala came aboard with none. When presently a Fang passed him what could be spared of his own portion, little Osala held back a long time — there was no mention in the bond of saving kindnesses. Before we left the bay for the dim alleys of the creeks, it was night. I never cease to wonder at the phosphorus — that most delicate and splendid and supernatural glory that plays about a boat in these waters. With that soft throbbing glitter about us and a string of stars above, we threaded the narrow waterway where sometimes there was a line of light, and more often none. About nine o'clock we came upon Ntyua — most extraordinarily metropolitan after our dim passage through the mangrove swamp. Two lanterns in Ntyua made bright shaken lights across the flooded flat before the town. We blinked. Some young bucks made a brave music with accordions, and from all the youth of Ntyua you would say there rose a murmur of laughing voices. It was disconcert- ing to come out of the sleeping wilderness upon so much light and music and laughter. Presently we were in a narrow street, very regular, eaves of the houses fairly high and supported on sapling pillars. Here, perfectly, was that mediaeval aspect which so strongly characterizes a Fang town. Women came to peer at us by the flare of pitch torches — forest people with bits of weather-worn cloth about their loins. At the door of his house, Robbie Boardman, the blind Mpongwe who is the evangelist in this town, waited for us to take his hand. Most of the houses are of bark and in a continuous row; his is of bamboo, detached, and has three rooms. Into this house we went with our bed-bags, big water-bottles, lanterns and boxes, — all the usual truck. After us piled in the populace to stand with folded arms. / was thinking: no headdresses to speak of, no tattooing, but, upon the face, lines of black paint, sometimes red. They were thinking — eh, what were they thinking? Soon I was asleep on a high bedstead, native-made, grass spread on the boards for a mattress. For this is an Mpongwe house. Robbie is not an ordinary sort of black man; he thinks quite consecutively. Of a haughty tribe, he serves the Fang, so far as I could see, humbly and freely, his poor patience marred a little by self-pity. On Saturday came people from neighboring towns, women mostly. We could very much love one another if we were given any sort of chance. They understand my Bulu talk a little, better than I understand their Fang. So we spent several days. In the evening we would sit with Robbie and Izure, talking in English of many things new and old. Sunday we had Communion in the little bamboo hut that is the church. There were present something like fifty. A lad and a woman were received into the church, and three young Fang bucks pub- licly confessed their sins and were received back into membership ; a woman did the same. These people are far away and out of sight in the forest; they wander about and often there is none to save. The women from a distance wanted me to go home with them to teach them, a most wistful expression of a desperate need. Monday morning we left for Ayol, a town up another of the waterways. It was noon when we struck the mud flat in front of a town where we left our boat. All our stuff was carried over that waste of mud to the town. Everywhere in the heat and sunlight, mud and brown water and mangrove trees were still and secret. Presently we were off in a little canoe: five Fang, little Osala, Mr. Wright, and myself very quiet on the box of the Communion service. From the wide river-way the canoe turned into a nar- rower, and from that into the very heart of the swamp. Green trees crowded us, from mud all about, little crabs as bright as Joseph's coat came out to see us pass; they waved rosy claws at us. The end of the water journey was a run into a mud bank; our boys drew the canoe as far as it would go, then carried us to solid ground, where, out of the green swamp gloom, forest emerged. An hour we walked through what I took to be a second growth, and then, to my surprise, we were in Ayol. I was not the only surprised woman in Ayol. There was a head, and more, at every door. Ayol is more primi- tive than Ntyua. In the house where I sat, peo- ple came and went to look at me. In the big, disordered house of an old Christian I made a cup of tea, while Mr. Wright was busy with the church session. The catechist's wife is a sweet girl who was trained at Baraka, a most efficient and impor- tant little person, with all the marks of a minis- ter's wife. She reads the Bible. This little Fang girl made many efforts to make me feel at home. And on a bit stool beside the fire among the eager forest women, her visitor was very much at home — a little fire began to leap in her heart. We had Communion in a poor little hut. The Christians brought their stools and sat about. In the hour, they had made what preparation they could — a new cloth, a new handkerchief. We were perhaps twenty-five people, a very simple company. I am thinking it was a true Communion. To me it was so. Afterwards a girl came crying to me; they were telling her to wait for baptism until another Communion season when she would be more established as a Christian. I comforted her as I knew how. At five we left Ayol ; it was up to us to get into the river before dark. We hurried back to our canoe; the tide had risen so that it was afloat in pleasant water. It was dark when we landed at the town where our stuff waited. This was a wild place. I had never before seen a town where I would fear to be alone. Here they had been drinking; men thronged the narrow way between the houses; the uproar while we ate, in a hut crowded with trade boxes, quite wore upon two people who had fared so far since early morning. Finally, Mr. Wright went out and called them down. By the light of wandering lanterns, we got packed again and away into the cool night. The Evangeline is a poor boat for night travel ; no proper place to lie down. Poor Osala all but dropped overboard in his lurching sleep. Old Izure — so like a grand vizier in the "Arabian Nights" — slept at our feet. We dozed as we could. The wind was favorable and it was not one o'clock when we turned in toward the lights at Hatton and Cookson's wharf. The sea had not seemed rough while we were sailing, but there was a heavy sound of surf. When the sail came down, Ndongo Nkoni said the water was bad. With that my heart sprang and raced. I never felt so sudden and unreasonable a terror. It was the night, I suppose, and sleep. We went alongside the wharf and could not make it; no use to try to land in the surf. We pulled away from the wharf and anchored for the night. My knees shook together, a most uncomfortable sensation. I lay on what I could find, in my sweater and rug, cold in the teeth of a wind from the North Pole, though Mr. Ford tells me it was a south wind. In the gray dawn we sat up, and by six were ready to try the landing which we accomplished. Mba Nkogo, when he helped pull me up on the wharf, is said to have murmured, Mbamba minga, — a fine woman, — because so light to carry. July 7. It was good for me to have been away ; I have come back to school quite refreshed. I write in school — Madoba is giving a dictation. Bla, says he; "Wa," go all the little mouths; "bla" write all the little hands, wise grow all my little sheep writing "bla." Andre is my new assist- ant; I have given him my class of babies and he is lost and sad. Once before he was a teacher, and then he spent hours writing beautiful pro- grammes in multi-colored inks. Now, I exact that he teach a letter a week to individuals. It is much easier to teach the alphabet to a class than anything less to individuals. But such are my whims. All the two days at Ntyua, I was thinking about the Fang and the Bulu, for they are of the same stock. There will be often, among the Fang, a perfect faun type and more often a sug- gestion of the faun. The Bulu is more human. I saw an old woman asleep on a bed in one of the large, cluttered rooms which the Fang build — a room brown and full of brown shad- ows, hung with baskets and wooden platters, gathered peppers, great brown cakes of the ndo'o nut, and all manner of forest litter. This old woman lay asleep on a low pole bed beside a fire. She was naked, except for a bit of cloth, and she looked old beyond imagination. She was a little old faun — you never saw anything more perfect. She had everywhere about her those little upward angles of lip and nostril, cheekbone and eyebrow, and little twirls of hair. But you will never see the like! In old times, the people say, there were many such who would be carried out of a fine day into the sunlight, but now, say they, the Fang die young. August 31. I am busy night and day now, my dears, with reviews in school, and at night I run about with a field-glass and give names to the stars. For this they come out as thick as rain; I look at one and at the other and I think, "Oh, beauti- ful! You are Vega! And you are Antares! And you, lovely one, are Arcturus! And you, who have most comforted me all these years, I know now why, because you are nearest the earth — you are the Alpha Centauri." So they go away with their names on their foreheads where you may see them any night after this. Only Alpha Centauri you will not see because it must stay by me. There has been a mighty conjunction of the stars and me. I suppose they have al- ways been somewhere about. But one night at Lolodorf I saw them, my dears, and the vast commotion of the sky. They seemed very wor- shipful, but they had no names and like that it was easy to lose them. That is why I am giving them names. And one by one they are to have little altars, and a little kid on every altar be- cause I can manage this very well and not miss them — I mean the little kids. I feel as happy as any one with a new religion invented by him- self and not inconvenient. September 9. Ma Sara is such a maternal person, — in the heat of any sort of emotion she is so graphic. She was telling me that she had heard that her young son Ogula wants to marry a young person called Owanga Ogow6, but not having heard it from himself she kept her own counsel. On Saturday she was working in her vegetable garden when along comes Ogula. A good deal of a rowdy he is, and not yet worthy of his mother, but she likes him, anyway. She was telling me about it. "An* I wonder what my chile want say to me j an* I was jes' clean my plantain — jes' bend over like this clean my plantain, an' he stan' up straight by me; an' every time I move away he moves jes' little, so; but I never ask him; I think, he is my own chile — he must tell me himself. So bye mbye he tell me he goin' to marry Owanga Ogow6, an' I think, aha! so he tell me himself! an' I say, 'So now you goin' to marry Owanga Ogow6, what about that other girl you was goin' to marry? An* why did you make your mother's heart turn to that other girl when you was not goin' to marry her, but goin' to marry Owanga Ogowe?' All the time I clean my plantain, jes' so, an' he stan' up straight by me. An* he say he can never marry that other girl — she fights all the time. He can't marry her. He say he was promisin' marry Owanga Ogow6 ever since he was HT boy at school an' she was KT girl at school. An' I ask him, 'Then why you break your promise so long?' An' he say there was another young man. So I say, 'Very good; but you know the old Mpongwe fashion.' An' he say, 'No.' These young people forget the old fashion. I say, 'You must never go alone across the river to ask for Owanga Ogrw6 — they will laugh and say, "Oho — Ogula ! " But one of our family will go ask her people for Owanga Ogow6. Then maybe it will be good.' So when I think of Owanga, in my heart I feel glad — because she is in the same church as my chile!" I was enchanted with Ma Sara when she was telling me all this, — such a sweet little love- story, and herself the heroine, — because neither Ogula nor Owanga are any better than they should be; though they have a better chance of being, I suppose, with so much goodness and mercy following them. Except by Ma Sara's faith, Ogula is not in the church at all. But she is always like this when she speaks of her children; their virtues are deposited with her, perhaps, and she should know best how rich they are. September 22. Here is the end of my letter. Mrs. Good is feeling very sad because we have word that her son will be indefinitely delayed — on the Kroo coast, where his ship, the Fanti, struck a rock. You can hardly imagine the excitement with which the Mpongwe wait the coming of young Good to this station, where both his father and his mother began their work. October 18. To-day I wandered down to the far end of our little holding. In among the trees by the fence some little girls were playing, — neighbors who had crept in under the wire and who had gathered a heap of ripe mangoes that had fallen upon our ground from a tree over the fence. One of these, a little ivory mulatto with sweet pale hair and gray eyes, was dreadfully startled to see me. She had a panic sense that the man- goes might, perhaps, belong to the white woman; but she took courage and invited me, very sweetly and like a lady, to have some. She is a most lovely little creature, the child of a mu- latto and an Englishman; a poor little waif, fading with anaemia. How can Englishmen, who would kill their legitimate children rather than see them corrupted, — how can they father lit- tle helpless girls like these who are bred to serve a trader's passing day! The school improves wherever I concentrate. That is very satisfying and very tormenting; the little teacher cannot sit on all her eggs at once. January 15, 1910. This station is to be left, like Corisco, in the hands of the native Christians ; the white people are to be withdrawn for the work in Kamerun. These days we have all the air of being sold out — all the poor old duds of this poor old station are spread out under the sun in the yard, and our neighbors, black and white, inspect them. We live half in and half out of packing- boxes, with an eye out for the steamer, which will not leave for some time after arrival. This is a Sunday. All our relations with the people are melancholy now; their feelings are wounded, and that is sad to see, for they are good and true. They are not angry with us, but wounded. Many good kind Mpongwe people I have seen burst out crying in these last days. They will be trying to speak reasonably and quietly, when suddenly they give way. This is painful to see, particularly in the old. January 20. Ma Sara, dear woman, was talking to me in the moonlight last night. The young people, she said, can never know how the old ones feel to see Baraka die. And that was a most preg- nant expression, for the Baraka pillars were all hewn out of the rock of a certain period. "I jes' sit at my window," says Ma Sara, "and I jes' watch the people carry everything away. They tek away the grindstone, an' I jes' say in my heart it is an old friend is dead an' they tek him away; an' so I watch them tek away one, two, three, ten friends, — all those old things they buy an' tek away jes' like old friends that die an' they tek them away. I can't eat, Mademoiselle, an' I can't sleep. When the mornin' comes I jes' think one more day — our few days. Mademoiselle, young people don't know — maybe they think this is a small trouble." It is really a hideous time, but has to be got through.