Part Two — The Mail from the New Clearing

Part Two THE MAIL FROM THE NEW CLEARING Lolodorf, October 2, 1905. Lolodorf Station is to move four miles to the west; this will bring us nearer home, but there are other primary objects to be served by the move. The present site is unwholesome and too small. It is impossible either to feed or to employ our schoolboys on our limited ground. We have bought two hundred and fifty acres of land, comprising three villages, some gardens, and a tract of forest. The villages show a hand- ful of huts, the gardens are clusters of plantains shaking out their banners in little clearings, but we own a world of forest. On Saturday of last week the headmen came to be paid. They had served us to all sorts of African dalliance and we thought that the pay- ment, in trade goods, was to be of a piece with the bargaining; but not so. When the three headmen arrived, followed by their henchmen and women, they played an unexpected part. In less than an hour, and with no more palaver than you might hear over the purchase of a basket of food, they were paid. We think that they were dazed by their opportunity, as small boys might be who were invited (oh, I know how fantastic my simile!) to eat their way out of a candy shop. Certainly they had a tranced air. When I came out to see the play, thinking it to have just begun, they were making ready to leave in a kind of cautious silence, — a compara- tive silence, be it understood, — and in very much the spirit of a missionary who is dreaming of home and fears to wake. The headmen were in full dress. Two wore hats that were uncommonly grand, still being cased in those cylinders of pasteboard in which they had been packed; two wore green broadcloth coats, — by the epaulets the uniform of some regiment and not originally intended for our friends, one of whom was too small for his coat, the other not small enough. They listened abstractedly to Dr. Lehman's caution that they were not to buy rum with their gains. They were in a hurry to be off, and presently they started, they and their wives and their friends, all laden with their goods. As a spectacle it was imposing, and of a kind to draw a head out of the door of every hut by the way. There were nests of zinc buckets, of iron pots, piles of hats, — perfect towers of hats, — sheaves of umbrellas and of cutlasses; there were tin trunks of a splendor unknown to you provincials, but familiar to us of the West Coast, — very gay, preferably green, with a lavish belt of red and no scrimping of gilt. In the trunks were yards and yards of trade cloth, bars of soap, pocket-knives, padlocks, matches, and many other cherishable articles that will change hands in numberless marriage palavers. With some such glitter of spoil must Tamerlane have returned from conquest. Yesterday was Sunday, and I went down the government road, speaking in the towns as I went. I passed our new land and the town where the goods were held for distribution. Such clamor and hum, such bustlings about of people clad in the magnificence afforded by our store, such declamations from a headman who was talking the distribution palaver and emphasiz- ing his eloquence with his staff, — such an aspect altogether of a village fair filled with sunshine! Nor was my passing without honor — "The woman of the Minisi!'* — and down the street came the dressy community. "Come and tell us the Word of God!" was the cry, for there was abroad a spirit of indulgence, to each his prerogative. But my instinct was the other way. "Not to-day; you are too noisy. How am I to know but that you have been drinking rum?" Drinking rum ! What gross accusation was this? Why did the white woman hate to speak in the palaver house? For the sake of peace I ducked into a house and spoke to some women. Outside all the eager tumult of tongues, the passionate voices of covetousness filled the bright air; but in the dark hut were women at the primeval occupation of grinding food, and not unwilling to listen to the white woman who was of so optimistic a mind about the uncertain dreadful future. Presently I went on, but with eyes and ears full of the animation of the little town. Sometimes of a Friday I go to a town twelve miles from here. Half the way is by open road and the last happy half through the forest. It is lovely to go to Ipose; they do so much want a Minisi there. I am espied climbing the hill afar off, for this cluster of villages lies in a beautiful hill country. They rejoice at my coming. An ivory horn announces me, quite as Elsa is an- nounced in the first act of "Lohengrin." The hut where I put up is opened, and before I can make a cup of tea there are delegations from the country all about. This will be four o'clock in the afternoon. At five we have a service, and again at half-past seven of the next morning. There will be an audience of, say, fifty people, minded to know of the high things of God. Every other week Benzhuli, the young elder, preaches to the people of Ipose; they say that his audiences are very large. A year ago Africa as a spectacle was tremen- dously interesting: I saw continually the forests and the rivers, the interminable, melancholy file of carriers, the curiously tempered light, the curiously modified color. But more and more a missionary comes to have to do with individuals. His labor and his problems are with these. Mr. Nevinson, in the August "Harper's," very truly says that the African is not known to the white man. He is not. I have hardly a fixed conviction or an inference as fruit of this year's observation, but the missionary comes to feel that the African is known to God. He feels himself to be — he knows himself to be — one in an affair of three, and God is the third. And he knows himself to be necessary to that union. He is the friend of the Bridegroom. October 5. There are ever so many bugs about to-night, and they make it hard to write. They are bugs that undress and leave their clothes on the floor, all the little wings of them lying on the floor. Yesterday we closed school because there is smallpox in the neighborhood. We vaccinated all the schoolboys and they thought it a tre- mendous treat. I washed their arms, Dr. John- ston scratched them, and Mrs. Johnston applied the virus, while the patient kept the face of pleasure and of pain which suggests the photog- rapher. October 6. Two hundred and forty people were vacci- nated by this white hand to-day — or to this many vaccinations did I apply the virus. It was a hurry-up job, I can tell you, with no pleasant stream of anecdotes to soothe the patients* pain. We operated in the church, doing as many as we could and turning the rest away when the virus ran out. Things are beau- tifully quiet. I am resting like a cat. Don't worry about the smallpox; there have been no more than seven or eight cases, none on the place. Just be glad that I have a month's com- plete rest from school. November 4. Bitum came in early in the evening with half his supper in his cheek, — and might not he go to a dance across the river? Go and ask the minister, said I. Mr. Heminger said that he might go, and explained to me that it was to be a "one-man dance," with the air of assuring me of its innocence. And now I must sit up till Bitum comes in from his one-man dance — or go to bed alone in the house, for the Lehmans are away at Elat. This minute he is back, and when I asked, Did the man dance well? I hear that he did, he certainly did dance a dance all unlike other men's dancing! — and Bitum chuckles reminiscently. The ballet, it would seem, had some features, not common and all new — as our Lady's Tumbler claimed for his tumbling. I have just been reading "My La- dy's Tumbler," and I think it is so lovely. The passion of the man in his poor short-winded speeches! November 7. There are some occupations which appeal ir- resistibly to the imagination. Now, I can't understand an indifference to cobbling. Don't suppose that this attraction dates from that mid-summer evening when Hans Sachs cobbled in the dusk by the light of his crystal. Just com- mon cobblers in their little caves are awesome, and seem to have the wisdom of certain old women who have both lived and thought. Surely you must have noticed that cobblers are very nice. I think of this because to-day I cobbled my shoes. There is certainly something in it; for I had pleasant thoughts of more than common matters, and while the shoes are no better than they need be, the mood was a real cobbler's mood. A trader at Kribi sent me up a pair of boots procured from no one knows where, but the fruit of untiring research on his part. Archaeological research, you would say, if you could see them; and I can't get away from an image of me writhing my way down the path to the beach. The toes induce this image. One understands the foolish virgins better, in Africa, ■ — sometimes we run out of oil our- selves. I am enjoying a few days of quiet leisure. All day I have the house to myself and at night one of the boys sleeps in the middle room. I must tell you about Bitum. With his earnings he has bought a goat and a kid ; it is the goat that will go over to the trader's clearing and plague him. For a long time Bitum has begged to buy a goat ; and at last, because of his importunity, — the goat's importunity, — Bitum was allowed to buy these. At this least convenient time I had to let him go to his town with his property, for it was evident that the goats must be got off the place. There was a man from Bitum's town here for a day or two; when we asked might n't he take the goats, we heard that no! the man was leaving on Sunday, — and that none of Bi- tum's cattle might walk on Sunday. So at| midnight last night, when Sunday, worn with virtue, collapsed into Monday's lap, Bitum set out in the moonlight with the goat so recently reclaimed from heathenism and with the inno-j cent kid. February 8, 1906. We have one hundred and fifty pupils in school. Mr. Hummel talks school morning, noon, and night; and I dream school or wake to hear the schoolgirls sniffling with colds or crying over their vaccinations; and at the ringing of the morning bell I hang out of my window to see that all go to prayers. Thus are infant civil- izations fostered and nurtured — this is a real word I am telling you — without blood and tears there is no evolution of man. Here is Abesola in a new cloth, the first real cloth ever I saw him wear; 't is the beautiful fruit of his labors; for this cloth he dug long in the earth and cut weeds of misty mornings. A white cloth with a pale-blue flower, — covering Abesola from his waist to his heels. Abesola casts down his eyes and smirks and I know how he feels, for I have pretty clothes of my own. February 20. Now every day is like the last, — though to say so is to take no account of the day the trader came to lunch. It was like this: Every one had gone to the new site but myself, so I ordered lunch to please me — I ordered noodles, if you want to know. I was sitting down to eat, with a book to read between courses, when down the path came a white man - — all booted and spurred. He had come, he said, to say good- bye. So we said good-bye; and, "Who shall I say called?" asked I, quite glibly, — and this was a wrong thing to say because Herr K. had been at the house before. So we parted some- what coldly. Only the dog would not follow him, — his dog that had crept under the Morris- chair. Really I had not seen the dog before the trader was halfway down the path, and then I saw, too, that there was a storm brewing. I sup- pose the dog guessed as much ; at all events he sat down hard; and I pitied him when I looked at the sky. I was like Hugh Miller — "I couldna drown the wee doggie." So I called the trader back and we lunched off the noodles. For all the terrific sky, it did not rain at all, and that pro- voked me. I heard lots of colonial gossip, — and that many men are fools. Herr K explained that is to be recalled for an affront offered to himself ; and nothing would have prevented much violent narrative but that I smiled. It was mean, — but consider my helpless circum- stance, — with Mr. K. flourishing his fork and calling down imprecations on the head of ; who, for all I knew, was leaning over the embat- tlements on the hill with an ear single to the honor of his name. So when I caught Mr. K.'s eye, I just smiled a very little and he came back to our noodles. I hate to remember the dog who begged to stay — for no express reason. We had to tie a rope about his neck before he would follow his master, who was much embarrassed by this defection and could not imagine what had come over the beast. February 21. I live in such a continual clamor, my dears. I make it my business not to mind the noise, except when it comes from the girls' quarters, when everybody objects to it. But it does make some sort of impression, as I discovered to-day. I went to hold a meeting in a village upon the crown of a hill, and when I got there the cup- board was bare, — all the inhabitants had gone into the brush to escape the soldiers, who are after carriers. Up and down the street I walked peering into the empty houses. Only three women were to be found, and as few schoolboys. We went into the little palaver house upon the brink of the hill. We sang a few songs, and then I asked, Did any one have a question which he would like to ask, — for, of course, I can answer any question that can be evolved. So I sat still while they thought, and they sat still, too, em- barrassed by their unusual occupation. Then, my dear, into that little palaver house, open every way to the afternoon, there flowed the quiet of the deserted town, of the green forest, of the blue hills, — the kind quiet of the un- populated earth. I could have wept for grati- tude. This may seem a little thing to you, just as leisure may seem a mild form of excitement, but it was as good as gold or spring water to me. Many things are changing here. There is first the road, very unlike the road as I first knew it, and now the government hill. For days the long cry of a live tree as it falls, until now the hill is as bare as your hand. Almost no bush towns are left, for all have been called out to build upon the road, so there is an end of afternoons in the little ways of the forest. Soon the telephone will be established between here and Kribi — then, automobiles. This is bad, as the fish thinks when he is pulled out of the essential element. But there are always the people, living their mysterious lives under one's eye. There is life with its unstaled, infinite variety. Courtesy is a wonderful screen, is n't it? These people sit continually behind it. There is hardly a town within a mile but I have a friend there, who is glad of my coming ; ready to lie to me, of course, and afraid of me, but \ glad and friendly. The names they call me, my ' dears, because I don't allow them to call me "Mamma," which is the common form of ad- dress — Matchenzie, Tchensie, and Mr. Mat- chenzie ! February 22. There was a dwarf in my girls' school for a few days, and for all she was no more than forty- eight inches high, she was a woman. All morn- ing she sat learning her letters and making little marks on her slate, which she thought was writing. And in the afternoon she worked with the little girls to earn her food. She was just about as big as the rest of them, but she could do more work, — cut more firewood and mow more grass. Because she is a dwarf they think in her town that she must work harder than anybody else. That is the way they think about dwarfs. Her husband bought her long ago from her people, in the close, leafy places of the forest, where her mother still lives, — a little, little old woman, I suppose, with a bit of a cloth about her middle, always cooking food in a kettle over a fire on the floor of her leaf shelter. Well, now here was her bit of a daughter learning her letters like any other lucky African, and learning other things besides. She was learning about God, which was a good deal. At least we could hope that if she were to stay a year, she would be quite another sort of a little dwarf. But to-day one of her husband's other wives came to take her away and she had to go. I put a needle through a card and wrapped some thread around it; then I gave her an aluminum thimble; and she was so pleased with so many possessions of so many kinds that she was not too sad when she went away. But I was. March 20. Here is an account of to-day. At eight o'clock I started down to the new site, meaning to visit along the way. Half a mile from the station the doctor overtook me and said, would n't I like to see the pest-house. Here the road passes a plantain garden, a little path takes one downhill to a ravine; in this ravine are four or five shelters and the patients live in these. This is in the forest; the garden is left behind. From beyond the settlement comes the sound of a stream. I stand fifty feet from the first patients, who are now able to come out, and presently there is a line of fifteen or so in a row, — men, women, and children, all with their eyes fixed upon the doctor, all talking with their eyes, poor things, all explaining with their eyes that while they once had smallpox, true, in the past, why, now they are quite well, and asking with their eyes, may n't they go home? For to-day, as they know very well, some of them are to be discharged. So there stood the brown line of them making dumb appeals. One after the other was examined by the doctor. "You go back into the house. You go to the stream and bathe"; and this last voice was the voice of an angel, for the man who bathed in the stream would be anointed and freshly clad in a new cloth from the hand of the governor, and sent on his way. There was a great silly fellow from Yaunde, and he contended loudly that he was well. Not availing, then he moaned, rocking his body and crying, " I must go home, mother is crying for me." The size of him and the childish wail of him were funny. From the pest-house I went on down the road. I passed a big caravan of Bulu, resting in the shade. One who lay upon his stomach in the middle of the road was emitting an even, steady harangue. All I could get of it was the word "kettle." "Is it a kettle palaver?" I asked; and it was. There never was a caravan but had a kettle palaver. There will be, say, four men to one kettle, and the combinations of imposition, insult, injury which can be inflicted by this company of four among themselves, with the kettle for implement, pass the feeble imaginings of the white man. The pathos of starvation, the cry of the burden-bearer, the outraged rights of man, the unjust division of labor, — all these voices and others as tragic wail in the kettle palaver. This I explained, in a fashion, of course, to the caravan resting in the shade, and the accuser fell to eating where he lay on his stomach in the road. Very well he knew that his palaver was lost, for the com- pany heard the word of the white woman and laughed. So I came to the new site where the naked ribs of our house bleach in the sun. Poor Mr. Hummel turns from his sun-struck labors to speak to me. Nkulu, his cook, greets me with a joy that passes reason. I am impressed and stop to wonder, and I remember that we are to have meat for dinner — we killed a goat last night and all the house-servants beam. I find the work-people's town where the women are rilling the kettles with plantains, and under shelter of a roof of leaves still green, I lie down upon a bed of split logs still odorous of the forest. The floor of the shelter is still untrodden, the broken brown earth is still clean, through the open sides of the hut I see the forest in the haze of midday. By and by I have lunch with Mr. Hummel, who is glad to talk. Nkulu serves the meal in a trance of bliss, — I eat even less meat than he had hoped. April I. The other day I was sitting in a hut on a bed, my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands. A woman lay on the bed back of me ; she was sick because her husband had beaten her. Suddenly she sat up and began to feel up and down my back with her hand, making out to her satisfaction that my anatomy resembled her own; dear knows how long she had wondered, and all her townspeople too. Presently I felt her hand on my head — stroking my hair, which I wear now tied at my neck, that the little bunch of it and the ribbon may cover the nape from the sun. Then said she, in a voice very tender and caressing, " Why won't you wear your hair as we do?" " Because I should have to cut some of it off." "And why do you hate to do that?" — still stroking my head. " Because my father would ask, 'What did they do to my child in the country beyond the sea — that they cut off her hair?'" She laughed at this. But I was touched by this wish of hers that I should be like herself, and I knew by the feel of her hand on my head that she loved me. All the time of late I am hunting a way to tell you that things have changed for me, in a kind and de- gree which matter a great deal, but which can- not be handed out in order. I have at last, in a measure, the passion of what I am doing. I never expected this. I feel like the mother of all these poor women. April 7. To-day I was in Manjuer Bian's house. Manjuer is a little woman, a Christian, who dresses like a man, — wears a man's jacket on dress occasions, — and who is comfortably rank of the soil. Often I meet her coming from her garden, her basket on her back full of roots and herbs, herself like some little brown root dug out of the ground. All her fingers are worn down ; one forefinger is quite gone. This is not so repul- sive as it sounds, only perplexing sometimes when I am in duty bound — in following a narra- tive of her recounting — to call off the number indicated by her fingers. " I have borne children — ugh!" says Manjuer Bian, holding up some fingers; and I must of course call the number, and not waste time either. "Ugh" is the call to arithmetic. The question is whether or not to count in the missing forefinger. You know how one wonders about a cross-eyed person, — as to whether one is addressed or another. Well, I was in her house to-day and there were other people, — the old blind woman and a headman (in a small way) who has lost one eye, but who looked at me with humor and kindness out of the other. "Is it a real word," said he, "that you are unmarried?" "A real word, indeed," said I. Whereat he laughed — irrepressibly and indul- gently. "I can arrange a marriage for you," said he. "That's exactly where you are mistaken," said I, "you cannot!" " Don't bother the child," said Manjuer Bian, who was securing her cloth about her waist and did not look up; more said she in Ngumba, of which I understood the word "little." "She says," said the headman, when I asked him, "that you are just a little girl." "Manjuer Bian," said I seriously, "don't you 9i know that I am a real woman? — as old as Mamma Lehman? I am grown a long time, Manjuer Bian!" Manjuer smiled very kindly, very discreetly; she sat on a little stool and fell to grinding seed on a large flat stone, her legs spread out on either side. Presently she looked up, still smil- ing. " Yes, Matchenda, of course, you are a grown woman!" said she, exactly as one an- swers a little girl. April 12. I wish you might just once see a caravan of young girls — Bene and Yaunde. You never saw the poignant charm of youth more per- fectly expressed. I suppose that pang which is associated with our appreciation of the charm of youth — and which is not all pleasure — is a sort of nostalgia. And then, one has, about little carrier girls, other pangs of a more obvious nature. They are so timid, such pitiful little timi- dities. Yesterday I passed one who had turned aside to give me way. I stopped very close to her and said something friendly ; but at my stopping and at sound of my voice she froze into a per- fectly immobile terror; not a muscle moved under her smooth skin; she did not so much as wink; all her bones melted within her, I sup- pose; and like a little forest creature that has no apparatus of defense, she trusted desper- ately and without reason to passivity. I have seen this extreme terror before and no com- passion avails with it. So I did the only kind thing, which was to pass on. There was another little girl in the caravan. I walked awhile be- hind her, and it was sweet to see that little buoyant body tread the earth. Her little bustle of leaves was fresh and green, gathered from a sweet-scented plant; it beat about her pretty thighs as she walked. Presently she turned her little merry face, and I made some kind of sign that I was an amiable, quite human person; at which she laughed and exclaimed in her adorable treble — chattering to her friends ahead — that the white woman had done thus and so. This caravan came from no very great distance with roof-mats for the governor; they were, I judged, all the available people from one neighborhood, and they had more than commonly the innocent aspect of country folk. April 24. On Sunday I went to Masokna — about two miles from here — trailed by certain friends, and we had a meeting. Yesterday I went to Wongali, which town is still in a turmoil over the distribution of the women left by the head- man who died in December. This distribution took place two weeks ago and was a sort of minor judgment, — the sheep and the goats quite naturally dividing themselves. You can't believe every black man who claims to be a Christian, but when you see a black man re- fusing an inheritance for conscience' sake you can give him some confidence. Two men who knew better took the women who fell to them, — Ngoe and Ndongo did not. Poor Ndongo — so like our comic-paper negroes, so like the negro of the minstrel show, flapping his long shoes ahead of his progress; the size of his lips somehow discounting the width of the brim of his hat, — and yet, a man so honestly good that one comes to recognize him afar off — so easily recogniz- able, poor Ndongo — with joy. He stood out against the subtlest form of temptation to which the black man may be subjected; a co-heir with himself — a young fellow of his own age — came off with an establishment of four women, which is a pretty fair start ; he may achieve greatness. All my progress in these last days is attended with lamentations; there is a perpetual chorus on the part of our neighbors — who will not be comforted. You would think that we were going into a far country, — that "the flowers of the forest were a* weed awa'." Poor Mrs. Lehman hates to leave this house where she has lived since she was married. Quarantine was declared off to-day. I am so sleepy, my dears, that there is nothing else for it. Hear the conversation at the door, between Mrs. Lehman and a carrier — a big Ro- man of a carrier, with a half-disk in silver set in the center of his forehead where the hair meets the brow. "My name is Zola," explains the carrier. "There is a great man of that name beyond the sea," says Mrs. Lehman, — and the carrier expresses a blissful conviction of his rejoicing in that light. "But he is dead," continues Mrs. Lehman. "A pity!" cries out the carrier in such an accent of personal loss as would puzzle you to explain — unless you had some sort of sense of the intense preoccupation with self which is characteristic of these people, and which fastens upon all available matter. April 26. I certainly must tell you that several new members have been admitted to the Nsamba — which is the class of instruction preparatory to church membership. Only earnest Christians are taken on this list. There were some fine lads, some men, Vunga (Benzhuli's wife), and some other women. The Nsamba must number thirty now. Well, it is awfully hard for the old Ngumba women to learn the Commandments in Bulu, but that is a condition of membership, and it is pitiful and funny to hear their exami- nation. One old woman, Mpashima, fixed Mr. Fraser with a most earnest gaze and said, "Thou shalt not kill another's — woman!" About then I wished I had as big a hat to cover my mouth as Motefi held over his face — he spent most of this hour behind his hat and I was glad he had it. It was fine to hear Nzonbui rehearse without a break and with calm intelligence. Poor, sweet little Vunga nearly fainted, though she knew them perfectly. You should have seen her when they stood in a row to agree to certain doctrines before admittance. One of these reads, " Do you acknowledge that God made man and woman equal? " Very slowly went up the young Vunga's arm, and her eyes sought her husband, who sat behind her, with the prettiest air of deprecation. She certainly is a charmer. I was called in con- sultation when she had a misunderstanding with Benzhuli once. " Don't let yourself get angry with Benzhuli about your garden work," said I sagely, "for you know that he is very ignorant." " Ignorant!" says Vunga, in a passionate, scorn- ful calm, "very ignorant he certainly is!" May 4. This is written from the new site. There is moonlight outside and all about in the clearing, — heaps of burning logs, — so that the forest is apparent in a circle about us, and nearer than this the slender corn set at random among the stumps. Plantains there are, too, — mostly young, — and, oh, walk very gently lest you tread down my little tomatoes that I planted, and my orange slips. To the maternal eye these were most promising, and I felt a real pang when Dr. Lehman said they looked sickly. It was the 1st of May I moved, my dears, — I woke early. It seemed a fitting date for such a celebration. At nine o'clock of the morning all my household goods, carried in procession, took the sun; and a brave glittering was that. Much honor was done them by the inhabitants of the villages by the way. You would have marveled to see certain of my belongings — so familiar to you — carried aloft under such alien skies. All day that day and all day the next day I super- intended the placing of loads, and to-day the Lehmans moved down. The first night and the second I slept in the house with Bitum for company, — Mr. Hummel slept in the store- house, and the moonlight flooded the open spaces of the house. You know how Tintoretto's holy families set up their little establishment in some corner of a house still in the building — just like me, — only I had n't any family. May 5. It was amusing and interesting to-night to see the work-boys come in for the money they will put in the plate to-morrow, when a collec- tion will be taken — the first collection taken in the church, though the Christians have con- tributed always. Almost all the boys had their "books cut" for a sixpence or a mark, and there sat Dr. Lehman handing out the silver to the crowd. I remembered father giving us our five centses for the plate. There in the crush sat Minkoo, the little steward, mending his beautiful new trousers — with an unmistakable air of Saturday night. We observe communion to- morrow. People from Lam and from Ipose passed to-day on their way to Lolodorf, where the service will be held for lack of a house here. When I saw the poor dears come in single file, drooping under their burdens of children and food, and smiling in their wistful fashion, I was so happy. THE VILLAGE STREET May — . We have been down at our new site nearly a month, and begin of late to develop windows and doors, just as we begin to realize that these are effete luxuries. We live in tenement fashion, all in one house; but this is the result of neces- sity and not of a perverted taste, and we mean — as I suppose all tenement dwellers do — to reform when our circumstances improve. We are all very polite to one another, and that is a great help. This is Saturday morning, when the school- teacher does her odd jobs. To escape the sound of other odd jobs I have come down to the school- house, which should be, on this day of the seven, neither schoolhouse nor church, but just a roof over a clearing in the forest. From the dwelling- house to the schoolhouse is some eight hundred feet, and this is about the diameter of our present clearing. The forest stands charmed about this breach. Here the fallen trees measure their amazing barren stretch of fallen trunk, and the scant, withering crown of foliage that makes so small a display upon the ground. Everywhere the logs burn. In these gray days of the rainy season the clearing is filled with a perpetual thin blue smoke. Here and there among the debris of the forest appears the corn in ragged companies of invasion — the advance guard of that old army that served the Pilgrim Fathers. Everywhere in the incomplete clearing is ac- tivity: men rolling logs and chanting as they labor; men in single file carrying on their shoul- ders the house-posts and the long, straight length of a roof-tree. Chanting as they come, men bringing in rolls of the yellow bark which serves us for walls and which they spread out to dry, a bright pool of color under the sky; companies of lads coming in at noon and at evening with loads of broad leaves, and singing the song of the roof-thatch. From this island, cast up, you would say, by the sea of forest and seized upon by man, the earth under its cover of green falls away. To the north between the thinning trees we see the blue of ranging hills, to the south we see a hill. There are hills, I am told, all about us, which will presently appear. Through our property, and a few hundred yards from our door, runs the government road to the interior. Here in the schoolhouse, where it was to have been quiet, Mr. Hummel is making benches with desk attachments. He is most compla- cent about this furniture, which is, indeed, very grand. Here, too, are fires lit to dry out our mud floor. Of a week day there will be two hundred ioo pupils, men, women, and children, under this roof. When you consider that we could not, at the old station, with the best will in the world, accommodate more than fifty boarders, and that we could not, under the most inventive sys- tem imaginable, provide, on our twelve acres, work to pay for the food of this number, you will realize how truly a new era has opened for us. We do not yet have the boys properly housed ; they sleep like forest creatures where they find shelter. Indeed, they have in the mass, at work in the open, a uniform forest aspect. But under the school-roof, ranged on their rows of logs and to the eyes of their teachers, what thrilling individual differentiations ! There is a little boy whom I shall remember always as he stood in line for registration, though he will, it is to be hoped, make some more brilliant showing in the future. He was a very small boy with a fixed expression of panic and rather more than the average allotment of clothing. When his turn came, he was asked his name, but he could not bring his mouth to answer. "Have you paid your tuition?" asked Mr. Hummel, — for this was a day scholar who must pay the equivalent of one mark for the term of ten weeks. IOI Still not a ripple of response on that little frozen face, only a flicker of fear in the eyes. "If you have not paid, you must go to your town and find something, some food or a cut- lass, something you must find." Still no answer. "Move on," said Mr. Hummel. Then, coming to life, the little boy thrust his hand into the bosom of his upper garment, and brought out, from where it had lodged over his stomach, a little fat-bodied bottle of green fluid, — lavender water by superscription, and doubt- less very potent to anoint the person. He was en- rolled, and it doth not yet appear what he shall be. Sometimes little boys go far in a short time. Yesterday, in that half-hour before school opens and when the advanced pupils gather to study, I took note of a little boy who sat on the front bench of the senior division. He is, I suppose, eleven years old, an eager little chap, very care- less and heedless but clever, and quite able to teach the beginners in German. Mr. Hummel has put him in charge of the first German chart. Now, as he sat dangling his feet, he covered his eyes with his mottled German primer and was still. I knew that he was praying about his lessons and his chart class and all his little difficult concerns. Presently school begins. Mr. Hummel reads, and asks a Bulu boy to pray, which he does standing up, calling down blessings in his sweet staccato voice upon " Mamma Ford " and ' ' Miss" Hummel and "Mr. Matchenda." Then these three worthies, girded for the task and doubtless blessed in spite of certain indiscretions of address, set about clearing the forest of the African mind. You can't think how sweet the women of this country are. We have just come out from a nine weeks' quarantine for smallpox, and in all those weeks I had no other occupation than to go about in the villages and acquire affable Ngumba manners. The time was happy for me because the women began to love me, to be very sweet and maternal toward me. It is beautiful to see their gentle ways with me, whom they take, in spite of every protestation, to be a little girl. They think that I am ashamed of my ex- treme youth and they have a little sly, smiling way of agreeing to any age I may suggest. They begin now to tell me of their poor struggles to be good ; their Waterloo is inevitably the Seventh Commandment. They are very pitiful about this. The more one cares for them, — and you must see that one comes to care very much, — the more one is grateful to Christ that He saw such things in the flesh. May 27. There is a woman living in this neighborhood — fat, my dears, beyond any experience of mine ; I mean, fatter than any I have ever seen, and fatter, of course, than I have ever been. I want you to understand that this woman is really very fat. She is a monstrosity. And she carries very openly the tragedy of being very fat — the tragedy of being belied by one's aspect — which would have one gross, whether or no. Marie Bashkirtseff painted that into her por- trait of her Cousin Dina. The fat woman's name is Menge. She lives in a town near by; and when I have spoken in that town she has brought her huge bulk to the house where I sat and has dropped it near me, looking at me from the heap of it very gravely, — she is not one of your rollicking fat women. Yesterday Bian, the elder, said that Menge wished to confess her belief. But she did not come to church to-day; she had not courage — poor, fat, desperate woman — to face the smiling faces that always turn her way. After church Mr. Fraser sent for Bian to bring her, and I saw her come — following after Bian down the path that runs past the house to the church. Bian had the air of a lion-tamer, but not an absolutely secure lion-tamer, and the poor woman ! she had the air, my dears, of martyrdom. It was raining and she held an inadequate umbrella over her body, which was nude except for a leaf apron and bustle. She swayed on her slight ankles, — walking is no joke for her. I greeted her as she passed, but she made no answer. I spoke to her again — no answer; then said Bian, with his air of cautious lion-tamer, "Greet Matchenda!" At that she turned her small face on me and I saw the misery of it; she was running with patience the race which was set before her ; she might not cast off the weight either, and the cloud of wit- nesses was hard to be borne; she was bearing the cross and she had set her teeth at the shame. In her poor dim way she was looking unto Jesus — who was the author of her faith and who would finish it. After she said " Mbolo" — with no comfort to herself or to me — she went off down the path, her bustle beating about her legs and the rain running off the points of her um- brella onto her body. It was altogether one of the least amusing things I ever saw. Mr. Fraser says that she was absolutely direct in her confes- sion. Bian came to me afterwards in a passion of protection — and would n't I please help her all I could. "You who are the thinnest — you who are the smallest — help her all you can," said Bian the lion-tamer, or something else like that he said. July 3. On Sunday Bekalli preached. It was great. The house was packed, which it has not been since our coming down here. Little boys hung about the platform and sat upon the ground. Manjuer Bian sat upon a chromo of the Kaiser which was waiting to be hung; she broke the glass and we led her gently off. Everywhere there was a pleasant happy stir. Bekalli is a little man ; he wears a white sing- let and a dark cloth with a red border. I noticed when he stood up that he was immaculate. He stood for half a minute with his customary ex- pression of quiet happiness; suddenly he smiled — and then he went off like a sky-rocket. The house hummed in answer to him, and his images passed in procession. I am sure I could n't tell you what it was all about, — he spoke in Ngumba, — but he held me for thirty minutes. Scotch blood is so tyrannical ; I thought — poor Scotch spinster thing — that I was his mother, the mo- ther of the dear little minister. And I had this very same obsession on a gray Sunday three weeks ago when Ngwa, long and dark in his over- alls, preached to a rainy-day audience, his teeth clenched on his natural shyness and his poor sermon balking all the way. July 4. I have just come in from one of the work- men's huts, where half a dozen women are pre- paring food while as many men sit in the fire- light waiting their portion. Nshicko has been drawing melancholy pictures of that time when the women will dominate the men. " For it will come," says he; "I see it coming." Happy the man, said I, — no, — I said like this: "Then who will see good but the man with no more than one wife — pity the man with five!" "And I," said Nshicko, "shall have none! I shall make a little clearing in the forest and kill any woman who comes near it." I must tell you; the doctor has been having lots of patients with dysentery, from among the carriers. At one time there were eight in the hospital ■ — poor spent fellows that crawled in here to die. And this they promptly did, but not all of them. There are two in a little cabin by themselves, and, oh, but they are hungry for forbidden fruits ! One had roasted an ear of corn, and when the doctor took it from him the poor thing cried. To-day the doctor put a bit of meat into the makabo soup he sent them, and when he went out to see how they liked their soup, he found those two poor skeletons fight- ing over the bit of meat. One of them was tak- ing a stick to the other — and they were libel- ing one another. "He is of the tribe that eat people," whimpered one, "he would just like to kill people and eat them." The carrier is being driven pretty hard at present. Dr. Lehman weighed a little girl and her load, — the load hit the twenty-six kilos 1 and the child went one kilo better, twenty-seven. This is common enough. Poor little girls! July 10. On Friday we did not get into Ipose until three, because we sauntered. There was my nice little hut, with my bed-bag still hanging to the ridge- pole, and very soon "the bed was made, the room was fit." One little table I spread with a clean oilcoth; on this I write and eat. On the other table I put out my tea-basket; it is my joy, and makes it possible for me to eat. The utensils shine gloriously. For supper I had an egg and a corncake and some canned cherries. At five o'clock I spoke in a palaver house. Two little girls slept in the hut with me, quietly and nicely, like little kittens. I asked them whether they trusted in God and they said, 1 A kilo is two and a fifth pounds. In later years the gov- ernment enforced a maximum tariff of weights and corrected, so far as possible, these abuses. "We don't know yet whether we trust in God or whether we are very bad people." Twelve women came with me from I pose to Lolodorf, wishing to attend Communion and trusting to my protection by the way. When we left the forest for the government road, the donkey met us, not by chance as this would seem to read, but by design forcibly borne in upon the donkey by a Bulu boy. So you see your child astride a small, loitering beast, and following close after, a file of twelve women and girls, all laden with garden food for their journey, and presenting that uniform patient aspect of burden-bearers which is so pitiful and so common. We made our twelve miles com- fortably enough and were not molested. Bitum has a love-affair which runs thus: "Now, I was out, but not exactly to hunt a wife (though my goats have increased) when I saw a Bulu girl, and I stopped right there. ' I love you,' said I, 'and I won't hunt any further.' 'And I love you,' said she, 'but another man is paying for me.' So we sent for her father to come from his town — for she was just visiting her nephew (and her nephew did certainly like me) — and when her father comes to my town my brothers will have the palaver cut. If her father won't agree, we will take it to the gover- nor. Strange thing — we are just of a size and very much resemble — you would say we were of one mother!" I saw the bitter end of a marriage palaver to-day. Mbinawon — a girl who has been with the Lehmans for years — hated to marry the man who was buying her — a terrible heathen. Moreover, she had another in mind, — who is of her own generation — a Christian with no other wife. But Mbinawon's father could n't collect the goods which had been given him for her and he was in a fine box. To-day he followed the only course open to him, — he gave over another daughter, Dada, a child of some- thing like seven — ugly at all times and to-day, under a tissue-paper hat, ugly as a gargoyle. Her poor little stomach stuck out under a Mother-Hubbard dress; her whole little body was rigid with fear. All her relatives howled with anguish at her departure, and presently Dada howled, too; it was dreadful. I shall see her from time to time, as she has been bought by an Ipose man. Poor little wretched Dada! July 27. On Monday I went to Ipose. I took a ham- mock for as much of the way as was open road ; in the forest I walked. It rained, and where no the path ran through clear growths of cane or high grasses I enjoyed all the benefits of a box shower. I rather thought that I would go to bed and so escape rheumatism and other ills. The people of Ipose, seeing me while I was yet afar off, blew the horn which calls to service and summons the people from their gardens and the neighboring villages. The costume of the preacher deserves to be described in de- tail: A dry dress over a nightdress, stockings made of a blue polka-dot handkerchief, and shoes made of bits of oilcloth. I promise never, never to dress so again, especially at home. I promise to take a complete wardrobe and a clothes-wringer when next I go to Ipose. But, really, I was thought to be rather presentable there, and was not without honor. I spoke in the morning and evening to more people than I have yet spoken to — I 'm sorry, but I have n't an idea as to how many, for I am always too much interested in what I am doing to count. But I had the nice, cozy feeling which comes with a full house. In the evening, after I have eaten, the women and children crowd into my hut and we talk, but not necessarily on serious subjects. I think that I shall manage to get out there every two or three weeks after things get under way. Efulen, July 31. I have a line written to you on the road, but can't get at it now. I got in this afternoon, and there is this chance to mail before I go to bed, and to say I had a fine time. I saw girls, my dears, with green vines bound about their brown bosoms and the flash of their brass armlets as bright as sunlight in the green gloom. If only you could know how lovely it was to dip into the peace of the forest and to stay there. I shall tell you a lot by the next mail, but I would rather go to bed now. This station is certainly nearer the clouds than I expected. On the road, July 27. If you want me to-night you will have to call up Son Ntangan, which being interpreted means the "White Man's Grave." This is no flight of fancy nor any false pretension to distinction. The Grave is really here. I have pitched my tent in the shade of the palms which mark it. Otto Liibcke, born in 1850, died in 1894 on the road, and buried here, poor man. Alone at his death, and his grave lost in this forest village! Tied to the pickets about the grave is a china leopard, as big as a kitten. There is a tradition that his mother, wishing very much to see his grave, sent this — well, say, substitute. You can think how likely! But if it had been the wish of the government to establish a guard- ian spirit, none more effective than the china leopard could have been devised. The grave is clean, and held in respect. We left the station at one o'clock (school closed this morning) and "fell" at four. July 28. Like dogs as much as you can, you cannot like African dogs. When you come here, I will teach you how to speak to an African dog when you want him to go away. It is fine to think that I know all about a bush path at last. When the older missionaries wag their heads and say, "What do you know of bush paths?" I shall be able to say, — modestly, of course, not to antagonize them, — "I crossed from Lolo to Efulen by the bush once." We had a bad hour and a half this morning, up and down hills, and walking logs still wet with dew; but everything held, and presently we came out by the Bekui, grown since I saw it at Lolodorf. I crossed in an abominable canoe which had broken both noses. I asked the lad who pad- dled me, "What sort of canoe is this? Do you want to kill the white woman? " " No," said he, with all gravity; "I am a person from Iposel" Sunday, July 29. I thank goodness that the heat of the day is done. We had a meeting this morning — about fifty people, perhaps less. Every one made him- self comfortable in the palaver house, on a bed or a mat, and took my discourse philosophically. The headman here is a sort of good-humored old fellow, easy-going and wise in the ways of his world, wise in the ways of the aboriginal heart. He listens to the chat of my young carriers with a wise and smiling tolerance. You should hear them tell animal stories. I sat for an hour in the palaver house this afternoon, and I saw more snakes than I ever saw before, with no more apparatus than the hands and the forearms of the carriers. Beautiful gesture is common here, rather more with the men than with the women ; beautiful, free gesture, and dramatic imper- sonation pushed to the limit. This evening we had another meeting in another village of the same town — about thirty, mostly men. Ma- lande translated my Bulu into Ngumba for me. He is wonderfully clever at translation, and will not omit so much as a gesture, so that the speaker gets a curious impression of looking into a mirror which reflects — with a difference. This morning I walked through a lovely bit of forest with the river for company. Yester- day I had a little fever, and to-day all objective impressions have that perfection which I have often noticed as a circumstance of physical weakness. Convalescents see the world in that beautiful, clear light. This morning the brown and the green and the gray of this world, the gray of the orchids hanging still in the gray air, the little brown boy passing in the street of the village with a gourd on his shoulder, — a new gourd, as green as a young leaf, — all these I saw this morning with a quickened sense. We left Nkutu at a bit after six; and at half- past seven we reached a town where we knew the paths to part, one short and difficult and the other long, and difficult, too, for all we knew. We were for the short path and some one must be found to guide us. The incredible evil of that town has become a tradition with my carriers, and its impudence. The only man who would agree to go asked sixteen marks! He might as well have asked a hundred. We laughed in his face. The carriers picked up their precious loads, the hammock-men their invaluable woman, and we shook the dust of that lost town from our feet. We took the long road, and asked the way as we went. Oh, the lovely, lovely day, my dears! Uphill and down in the unbroken still shade, and then the long avenue of a de- ii5 serted clearing. Miles of this, like a great over- grown road, and always with its haunting sug- gestion of a people past and forgotten. Here is a beautiful river, and here were many towns that defied the government at the time of the Bulu War. Where the villages stood, the grass grows waist-high and the trees of the forest make their unchallenged return. Once I saw an old call- drum, rotting and silent these eight years; and not another human implement did I see in all the long clearing. Early in the forenoon we stopped and held a meeting in one of the vil- lages of Ngongo, a fine string of towns by a river. This was still Ngumba. Long ago Dr. Silas Johnson and his wife passed through here, and are remembered. At noon, at the top of a great hill, we came into the first Bulu town. Here we ate and I spoke to the people. All the afternoon we walked in the forest. Not one soul did we pass on that little path ; few enough had we passed on the trip up to then. At three we came out at a town where my men ate and I lay resting in a great, cool palaver house. There was no sun this day. At five, my tent was pitched on the top of a hill with the country to the west spread out for my approval. There was the tent for a home and the cot for all comfort. Kulu fed me. The carriers slept in a house near by; I was able to buy them a little venison, and every face shone. My dears, if only you could have seen the pretty piece of mischief that hung about my camp that night. I noticed her first for her round charm, a bustle for a dress, and plenty of brass armor. Then I saw her ogling my haughty young carriers, who gave her such terribly insolent snubs as surprised me. For myself, I could no more look at her severely than at a kitten, though I knew well enough that she was a very naughty little heathen girl. "If you want to make a visit," said I, "visit me. Come here, into my tent." So she came, pouting. "I have a great trouble,' ' said she, in her mellow girl voice, " I feel it very much in my heart. I am a person to be pitied. Look at me, the great grown girl that I am, and not mar- ried. I work very much to get a husband and not a man will marry me. I know that Mr. Johnston has said that any woman that has a trouble may speak of it to Mamma, and I feel this very much. So I ask you to show me a husband." Stopping at this point, which would pass almost anywhere, I think, for a climax, she looked at me tragically, but with some eagerness of expectation. "And can a guest cut such a palaver?" — and more of such un- satisfactory matter I handed out to her of a moral nature. Depression grew upon her. "I am tired of waiting," said she; " I want the thing to come to a finish." "Go to bed," said I; "I don't want you about here." But presently she came back in a rage. My terrible boys had treated her harshly, and I must in justice cor- rect them. 11 Kulu, I want to hear this palaver," I called; and Kulu's voice came back through the dark, a disgusted boy voice, "Miss Macken- zie, I hate to!" But he had to; and then, my dears, if you could have seen those two young beauties in the light of my lantern — Kulu looking down at her over his lifted chin with a primitive youthful scorn that suddenly made Adonis a perfectly credible person, and that little teasing termagant declaiming her wrongs. They had trampled upon her kindness in draw- ing them water, and bringing them firewood; they had tormented her. "Listen to me," said I, "If you are wise, you will shun such cruel people." Kulu kindled. He had watched me narrowly, and now beamed at me and at her. "Aha! Do as she says!" But the girl drooped. I had a meeting here. A bad night with a fine rain, but quite thirty people came to hear. But you can see for yourself that I found few people on the trip, when you consider the extent of it. I spoke very especially to the women, and this night they seemed to feel a wonder at the con- descension of God. The next day we walked un- til three, when we reached Efulen. At one town we were resting in the palaver house; a few women came in, and it proved that one of them was the aunt of Maland6 and that the town was his mother's town, to which she had never returned since her marriage long ago. Now was great rejoicing, not clamorous, for greetings are commonly subdued; but Malande, great shy fellow, must sit, after the ancient custom, on the knees of his newfound relatives; which he conscientiously did, with eyes cast down and who knows what sensitive apprehension of the white woman's ridicule. All the carriers were much excited by this chance meeting, and there was prolonged comment as we walked on through the forest. At noon, suddenly, I lay down in a shelter, and Kulu got me tea. Food mended the matter, and we made the last three hours in great shape. At Efulen that care to which the carriers had accustomed me made way for the normal circumstance of life, and ever since I have missed it. I had two hammock-men, — for no more could be found at the last, — a tent- boy, a bed-and-bag boy, a boy to carry odd things for me and for the hammock-men and the cook. When I saw these five going off next morning with their pay, — boots and cloths and what not, — why, I wanted to go too. And I could n't see how they could leave me in such good cheer, who had carried and cared for me so long. August 5. Efulen hill rises high and abrupt in a nest of young mountains. All about us hangs the forest. Not a level of green tree-tops, as would appear from an elevation in a more rolling coun- try, but here and there, where an abrupt rise breaks the continuity, appear the white ranks of trunks supporting a scant garlanded foliage that shows the mauve or the russet or the coral of a new leaf. Between the multiplied folds of the mountains is a mist, a moving veil of blue. In this morning light, when the early sun picks out the massed colonnades from the body of the forest, there is a suggestion of those unin- habitable pictures by Turner — dream forests about dream temples. It is incredible that one should undertake to travel in the painted world about this hill, and I cannot conceive that I came here through such forbidding beauty. Dr. Good's house still holds together. At least they say he lived there. I suppose they know; but this man, who came first into the Bulu interior, who cleared this hill and adopted this country, who certainly is buried here, has come to be so complete a legend in the African tradition that a legendary and elusive quality attaches to my conception of him. He will not take form in my imagination — I mean credible form. He is so much more the "Ngutu Zambe" of native memory — who was "walking, walk- ing, always walking," and who came from God more directly than can be explained — than he is a man like another. I think that this remote and heroic aspect of Dr. Good is more common than people realize. I watch him as he appears in the missionary memory, and he always moves in a glow of pre- historic glamour with a shining helmet like Lohengrin's, all ready to put off for a far coun- try. I am so sorry to be here in vacation, and while Mr. Johnston is away. He is a big man in this part of the world. Efulen, August 10. You should see the senior Christian of this interior people. Such a little, old, wise, smiling woman, smiling at youth and its dear foibles, smiling at certain happy secrets of her own old age. I went to see her the other day, waiting for her in her hut until she appeared in the clear light of the opening, where she left her load of firewood. Greetings come after a decorous si- lence. She put her little old brown body close up against me where we sat on the bed, and then her hands on my knees and then on my shoulders, before she said Mbolo; all the time she was smiling at me with that kind, wise tolerance of age that is so reassuring to the pessimistic young — the very, very young, like me. The mystic Dr. Good appeared in her conversation in his shining helmet, going about from town to town on that visit from his home with God which was so amazing and so — well, say, so fecund in its results. Presently, like Lohengrin, he goes away; and when he went, says Nana, looking at me smiling, " I was a little new thing — me mbe obe mfefe." Then I saw Dr. Good in a new character, — a sort of anguished widow, dying, and leaving a great many more orphans than is common. And I believe this impression gets nearer the man. It was good to talk to that old woman, so wise and kind and merry, so much a pledge and a sign to a missionary. She has gray hair and is slightly undershot, if it is polite to speak of old ladies so. Smaller than I am, she is. When I went away I felt cheered in my deepest feelings. I did not tell you about the drinking at Ipose because I thought it would worry you. It was so much simpler than it sounds. I was sleeping there one night and had got to bed when I real- ized that the men in the palaver house were noisy — we have drinking enough in our forest for me to recognize the note. I got up, lit my lantern, and went to the palaver house. I agree that I was afraid. By the light of the fire they were laughing and chatting — perhaps ten of them. And, sure enough, they were drinking. They looked at me in their customary friendly way; no one was tipsy. I told them that it was taboo for the white woman to sleep in a town where the men were drinking ; and that the white men would certainly have opposed my visit to Ipose had they supposed that the men of Ipose would drink while I was their guest, and that I must move on if they did not stop. They said, why, so they were drinking; Mabiama had re- turned from a journey and they were recounting adventures, but because of my word they would stop. And they stopped. It was as simple as that. I went back to my hut; and I could hear the talk thin out and die away as the men parted or fell asleep. Soon only the sheep stirred in the town of Ipose. Mrs. Johnston will go backtoLolodorf with me, — to "show me the path," and to make us a visit. Lolodorf, August 30. Mr. Hummel left for America yesterday at noon. As I saw him break away from the school- boys that hung about him, I was glad, almost with a sense of disaster averted, that there were others of us left. September 2. Yesterday, my dears, was no common day, it was too lovely. I moved into my own room. Don't think that you can imagine my joy, not nearly, as we say in Bulu. The room fourteen by sixteen maybe, or seventy-five by a hundred. There is a porch on two sides and a little dressing room. As yet there is no ceiling-cloth and I can see the roof-tree up in the gloom. It rained last night, and as I lay in my little bed at this remote end of the house, in this big room of pleasant shadows, with my beloved articles of furniture lost in dim corners, why, I felt very solitary, indeed, like a person in a lonely bed in a lonely room in a lonely house down a lonely rainy lane in a lonely village. This feeling was quite blissful, whether you believe it or not, and I could hardly sleep for the pleasure of it. To-day Bian preached. I understand father so much better than I used to, and his incredible seminary classes in which every man was the superior, at the very least, of his fellows. Bian rubbed it in pretty hard, about the tree which was to be cut down if it did not bear, and cried out in refrain, "He that hath ears to hear let him hear." People are of two kinds, he ex- plained,— the timid and the bold. "We peo- ple of God are timid and look to God for shelter from the wrath to come, but you others who are the bold ones, — remember this, that you must be bold to the end! You, who can bear with boldness to hear the Word of God and to de- spise it, must bear with equal boldness that punishment which you will see; there must be no cry from you then, who are so bold. The deer who can bear to look the hunter in the eye must bear to die!" Now, this was said with a very direct delivery and with no very conspicuous emotional appeal. It was, I take it, as nearly a pure African prod- uct as one is likely to get in our business ; and it produced a peculiar indefinable excitement in the mind, which may or may not be due to a natural interest in the working of the African mind — no common spectacle. But it may be due to some other intrinsic characteristic of the African process. I have often felt the same mental excitement when listening to African eloquence. September 19. Last night we went to see a tree that had fal- len near the boys' house. The boys' quarters are among plantains and fallen trees. In the little clearing, before the squat line of huts, pushed and chattered the life of the station. In an open space apart by himself sat a boy at a rude table, writing. The dusk was closing in and he had a precious candle lighting the still air about him, and the cloth which he wore like a cape, and the grave young face, — his face that is both grave and gallant, with its incred- ible air of thought and pride and sentiment. Passing him we came in among our friends, all laughing and glad of food and rest. Presently we stood on the fallen tree, like the floor of a corridor among the plantains. I said to Mrs. Lehman, "Let's look at Africa." So we did; and there among the brown logs and the brown huts the violent young brown bodies gesticu- lated and rejoiced over their kettles. The eye could deduce neither more nor less than this, and I cannot tell you how much there was of squalor and the savage. Only at the other end of the clearing Obam — sitting alone by his point of light — leaned his head over his writing. September 20. Here is news for you and me and light upon the future. Mrs. Lehman and I, walking along the Mfaka, the government road, at dusk, met a woman with whom we stopped to talk. She had a huge fresh flourish of tattoo between her shoulder blades, and Mrs. Lehman asked her why she submitted her body to such pain. "Because," said the woman, "these marks will buy me food after death." Mrs. Lehman ex- pounded the future to the confounding of such commerce. The woman listened with growing wonder, until her emotions went beyond her discretion and she flung her arms about me, laughing. The African, you must know, is very social, and wants a friend against whom to lean in every moment of interest. We were very much interested. We had never heard this use of tattooing so much as whispered ; but when we came to ask, all the boys, laughing and shame- faced, said it is commonly believed. September 21. It is pleased entirely father would have been these nights if he could have seen his daughter sitting in her room with her friends as close as herrings all over the floor — big lads and little ones, and women and girls, all come in For to admire, for to see, for to behold this world so wide that I let them into. Never a newcomer but said, " I want to see your father," when I always owned up to him on the wall, and to mother too. Expressions of admiration and astonishment were unfailingly offered before the shrines ; after which and other introductory matter we would get down to business, which was of no less a matter than the accounting for and the justify- ing of all given conditions under heaven and beyond. No one who was not on the spot and in the heart of it can guess how busy and ex- cited people are who engage in creating a uni- verse. For myself, I have come to the end of a most vivid experience. I seem to have been so necessary to the process, and so popular, and so successful, that I am really embarrassed in speaking of it, lest I loom too large. The boys went home this noon for ten days, and it can hardly ever be the same again. I think back to its beginning, a small matter of a question or two, of an evening, and then sud- denly, the Bible to be explained and the solar system, but most urgently man to be explained! I was pretty weak on the solar system, I must say; but I made a fair showing on the Bible, and when it came to man I shone, and every one shone, and there was a perfect conflagra- tion. We had about four nights of such joyous deliberations, and to-night I feel rather lonely. The boys felt so happy to go home that I felt cravings on my own account, and wished that I might make up a little bundle of some odd things in a plantain leaf, and walk all day and all night till I saw the fires of home winking through the cracks of the hut in Seventy-eighth Street. Then I would cry out, "Me soya!" and mother would rise up and cook for me — some- thing special, of course, no matter what the time of night. Try reading Birrell of a Sunday in Africa. It is awful beyond reason — hard to say why, too academic, perhaps. Racine is pretty bad, too, because he deals with self-consuming pas- sions in a world so naked of other properties that an imaginative hermit begins to have apparitions. Shakespeare is just about right; his ghosts are better company than some people. September 30. I never have any time now except in the afternoon, when my energies run rather low from the exertions of the morning. In the eve- nings my room will be full of people — women and the schoolboys — who come to talk with me or to sit quietly in the pleasant lighted room. I sit and sew in my steamer chair, and all the time, my dears, there is the effort to pass the barriers of kind. We were talking so last night — about the common uses of life — when a cer- tain young fellow, who had been listening with a sad attention, leaned his head on his hand with a kind of sad weariness and said directly to me, across the heads of the others and the current of our talk, — across my effort and his effort, — "How we differ!'* I cannot tell you how much there was of balked endeavor and of relinquishment in his eyes; because, you see, — and he saw better than you can, — the differ- ence is so much to his disadvantage. But such a look is a challenge. How can you understand the necessity of rousing the courage of self in such as these? Though maybe you do, my dears, — you seem to understand so much. I think you must understand why I am willing to give up my evenings to who ever comes. One comes to have such different methods and such differ- ent hopes as one comes to know — and such different illusions, too, I suppose. Thank good- ness the time has passed when — after a passion- ate appeal to a higher nature, as conceived by the appellant — the sordid answer broke the heart. I declare that I can pass from the subject of integrity to the subject of salt fish without any sense of eloquence gone to waste. And one comes to have tnust in time, an optimistic attitude toward its processes. There is no little boy or big blunderer so unpromising but I can call up Time and turn over the case. "Take care of him for a year." There is a certain expression, common and very moving, a veil of softening over the passions of an African face, and that is the habit of self-control and of subjection to the spirit of God. There is not a member of the church but has this expression — which is quite a mystical blending of suffering and joy; and I never see the shade of it settle on a boy's face but I have to care for him. October 3. Do you remember when Ze and Malinga had their little son, Simon? A year ago last Febru- ary, and they were so happy. Last week the little boy died from eating poison mushrooms. This morning the word came from Elat, where Ze is studying for the ministry; and there was poor old Bunga, Ze's mother, who must know. Bunga loved the little boy so much, with that human passion of the old for the young of their blood. When I went into her hut this morning, she lay with her face in the dust of the ground. Presently she looked at me and raised herself ever so little. She shook her head, with her eyes on mine. It may sound simple, that she shook her head, but it was too much for me. She put her face in the dust again, and I cried. After a while she rose and brought a toy wringer which Mrs. Lehman had given Simon. This she contemplated with a kind of wonder, turning the silly little crank of it and wiping the dust from it. Suddenly, out of this dry silence, she burst into the heart-racking wail of this country, and fell to gesturing with movements terribly tense and singularly angular, angular like the movements on an Egyptian inscription, and tense with tragic human protest. All the life of that little child was rehearsed in this new light of terror and pity: its birth, and its little career. People came and went in the hut, conjured up by the passion of that old woman. I saw myself stoop in at the door and heard myself say, " It is a fine child." And many other scenes I saw, until the past crowded in and filled the hut. Then it was gone ; she dismissed it ; all that play of gesture was put aside, and the old woman drooped on the ground. Now she began to call ever so softly to her little grandson and to peer out of the door. Presently she was wiping the dust from the toy. On the wall there was a picture of Christ, out of a Sunday-school chart. Poor old Bunga got up and went to it, — not like a grown woman, my dears, but like a child. With her fingers she touched the face of it, followed the lines of it, and turning to me she said, in a whisper, "It is the Lord." And she wept. When I went back in the afternoon she was sitting quietly in the ashes. She said that she felt very ill, poor old woman, but she was calmer and more susceptible to the comfort of human contact. Her neighbors are making it pretty hard for her, especially since Benzhuli's child died. It is quite clear that the children of Chris- tians are doomed. But the old woman knows whom she has believed, and God looks after his own. Poor old woman ! October 10. After supper I go to the quarters where the wives of the workmen sit at leisure in the short dusk. It will be dark when I get back to my room and the people begin to drift in. I never really want them to come; before they come I am always hoping perhaps they won't come to- night, but by eight o'clock it is so interesting that I am glad ; and when I go to bed I lie and wonder at the strange unformed world of which I have had glimpses. Little by little their fear of ridicule is slipping from them, and I come nearer and nearer to the place where they live. The African is exceedingly secret; his thoughts move under cover. There is an obscure sense of mental excitement in any vital intercourse with a people so secret. There is, besides, a mental excitement in ministering to such a passion for knowledge. I cannot hope to give you any com- plete sense of how they inarticulately clamor about me of an evening. Their very silences, when they wait with shining eyes, are clamorous. I realize this, of course: that I both pipe and pay the piper. I pay a certain steep price for their — well, their diversion, if diversion it can be called which is at once so intense and so utilitarian. I pay the price of never — under the most harassing of circumstances — turning a deaf ear. This is a price. I also never laugh, but that is a trick, and no trick at all. If I did laugh, who would laugh with me? So it is easy not to laugh, but to lend the glad ear, when the grasshopper is a burden! I enlarge so much upon this period of my life (as Santa Teresa says) because it offers certain very interesting aspects and I can't seem to present them ; I can't feel that I am making you feel them. Probably you must wonder some- times, as I do often enough (but never with any sense of personal stake), as to the future of the African peoples. I don't know, my dears. I have not an idea. They wonder themselves; they have misgivings that haunt and shake them. They beg me to explain their low estate on any other ground, if I can, than their in- trinsic inferiority. They see as clearly as you do that the normal man does not sleep away the thousand years, or all the ages. At least some of them see this and are weighed upon by heavy racial misgivings. Their ignorance is hate- ful to them; they suffer. They ask questions sometimes with all the air of confessing sins. I am speaking of the men, the young lads. The women are not so mentally conscious ; they pro- claim their stupidity, but attribute it to their sex. They are very much less mentally active. The men and boys acquire very quickly the rudiments of such knowledge as we offer; they develop really wonderfully; their present is full of promise, but the shadow on their past lies over all their days. I can't work it out. But this is perfectly evident: God does indeed accept them and be- friend them. They seem capable of deep spirit- ual experience that is like a flame to refine them. You must take my word for this, who will never see the strange and subtle change that I see. October 12. Now, this is the way I call the roll in the Bulu school. "Child of a guest!" "Here." "Three Dreams!" "Here!" "Boejeli Maballi!" No answer; try again, until a neighbor of the ab- sentee explains that Boejeli is still in his town. "And why?" asks Matchenda. "Because his brother whipped him, and he said if his brother whipped him, why, he would just sit down in his town and not make school." "He hunts another whipping," says Matchenda, very stern; "he looks for me to whip him; tell him where I am! — Child of a Ngumba," to which name a boy of the Mvele tribe makes answer. "Biguer, why did you not come back to school yester- day?" "Because the people of my town en- ticed me to sit down." "Zambe, why were you absent?" "Because the people of my town enticed me" (Matchenda wakes from her trance and fixes these two with an eye, motioning with her chin to a bench by her side ; the two sons of Adam come up higher). "Sala, where were you?" "The soldiers caught a little girl in our town, and therefore I could not come." Mat- chenda waves her chin at the bench ; Sala drifts forward; and so it goes. Not, my dears, that I can claim to do the whipping. I write little notes to the doctor. "Whip this boy," write I, in a fine flowing hand; the boy reads this reflected in my eye. "Give this to the doctor," say I; and the boy takes the note with something less cheerful than the American postman's mien. The Bulu school is the primary school, you understand; my advanced classes are in the German school. The older boys are quite be- yond whipping; they behave, indeed, with un- common decency. October 25. Here I was to have written ever so many things I had in mind, but Kulu came and began to talk. Presently I thought he was talking as one black person talks to another — and this was too interesting to call off; not, indeed, that he had anything much to say, but that the curious racy flavor was strong in all his talk and too good to lose, and too rare in such a continu- ous strain. "So we walked that day until night and then we slept nkalebande [under a roof with- out sides]. We hated it, but we had to endure it. We were hungry, — dying of hunger, — but the cooking in the town was finished and the houses were shut. We had the wild mango nuts you had given us, and we said if only we had some water we would bear to eat nut soup ; so Ko'o said he would ask a woman for water, and he did. The house was shut and the woman said she had only the water in which she had cooked her meat. We said we would bear to drink that water, since we could not do better; so we had soup of the nuts you gave us, and that was all. We saw it bad. And with the morning we rose," — etc., etc., — until I felt the path under my feet. Presently he was philosophizing about his relations to his family. "Now, real grief," said he, "and does a man whose people still live know grief! he is not so much as acquainted with grief. People are of two kinds — those who know grief and those who do not"; and again, "Parents are such strange people — they never know when their child is grown — in the eyes of his parents he is still a child. I know this very well — by the very food my mother would have me eat." And so on and on, with the occa- sional swagger of his happy kind, and the occa- sional tenderness characteristic of himself, and the laugh that breaks through his sentences. He eats a handful of peanuts and drops the shells on the floor, not the shells, for they have been removed before the nuts were roasted, but the dry inner skin. Before he goes he tells me, with a kind of shy politeness, that every one is happy in the school for all Mr. Hummel is not here. This he means to be comforting, and it is. He has no axe to grind; he really cares for my peace of mind. I can't say now why I have scribbled this trifling chatter, except that it is n't trifling to me. It is full of human interest, and with an occasional flash of something above the level of the surface — or a gleam of some- thing below. October 26. To-day has been a miserable day — rainy. And last night I felt ill, and they said — all with one voice — that it was plain to see that I must abandon either my duties or my dissi- pations. And I, being ill, pledged myself to relinquish my dissipations — when the devil is sick, you know — and this morning the school was told that Miss Mackenzie could not be bothered with so many friends. I was obliged to Mrs. Lehman for telling them; she did it as nicely as could be. But I went back to the house and felt sorry and lonely and the way I feel ashamed to feel. I had a most interesting dream last night that would make you cry to read about it, only I won't tell you because it is vulgar to tell dreams. And I read in a paper the other day that it is vulgar to make a scrap-book of magazine verse ; and I am sorry it is — be- cause that is just what I was doing for Margaret, and now I don't know if I ought. One would hate to give anything vulgar to Margaret; see how my pleasures "are a' weed awaV October 27. Now the preceding is so nearly perfect a specimen of the effect of malaria upon the feeble-minded that you should hold it cheap at any price; but I give it to you (which is mag- nanimous in more ways than one) for ten cents — the price of the stamp and the fine for over- weight. Still, I did feel balked yesterday. October 29. To-day I discovered a little girl of fifteen, or less, who can read. She is from the forest town of Moga — where I fell from my donkey when I went to the dwarfs. I asked her did she re- member that incident, and she most certainly does. "I felt such shame that day," said she, quite drooping in reminiscence; "I was so ashamed — because all the townspeople said to me, 'And do the people of God fall off their donkeys like that?' " I hope you feel sorry for that poor unfriended child — married into a strange town, and striving as best she might to hold fast the honor and dignity of Christian living — when the white woman comes and endangers it all, falling off her donkey like any common heathen! Little did I think when I offered such a spectacle that I was troubling such a poor little heart. It takes an extraordinarily violent combin- ation of color to take the eye in this country, but I saw something sufficiently vivid to-day. I was walking from Lolodorf at the gray end of day and came upon a group of people from the other direction. As we drew near, the little company opened out, and there in the midst shone the bright particular star. He wore a long tunic of dark-blue cotton, and this was banded about the middle of his body and through the middle of the wide sleeves with a red-and-yellow flowered pattern, a band quite eighteen inches wide and as exciting to the sense as a shout. The astonished eye hardly detached itself from this banner of vanity, but once done and the at- tention turned to the bearer, he was found to be, in the matter of youth and beauty, as terrible as an army. He exhibited to perfection that com- bination of languor and virility which is the special curious grace of his kind, and that pas- sionate vanity which is a feminine foible and a male madness. You knew him for Narcissus and every passing face his pool. I have seen several such in Africa, always among the men; there is no such high conscious beauty among the women. Attended by mere men he passed to the east, and I wonder in what village to-night he dances to the moon. November 10. Bitum came up from Ipose to confess to a breach of the Seventh Commandment. He has been teaching school there. The woman is not living with her husband. I talked to her and the doctor talked to Bitum. She is a rather silly person with questing eyes ; I had suffered mater- nal anxieties as to Bitum's safety when first I saw those questing eyes. Well, never mind; that is what happened anyway; and I think it is a pity, but I don't think it is very dreadful. Certainly it is a pity. Bitum, of course, is re- moved from the school and from the church. The day he confessed, he sat, toward evening, in my room, — no dimples at all, but wiping his eyes on his crumpled felt hat. He had noth- ing to say; at least, he could not say it. But two days later, when he returned from closing school at Ipose, he came into my room and talked quite freely, wiping his eyes at intervals with his boy knuckles. This is the kind of thing he said : — "It was a nice school. No one could see it but must have thought it was a nice school. I used to worry about it sometimes; some little thing would go wrong and I would lie awake at night and think that the school was going to be ruined. But really it was a nice school sometimes. At noon my head would ache — a person would think the whole school was in my head. When I came away to-day not a child — not an old woman — but shed tears. They all shed tears — Ndungo Ze himself shed tears.' r An interval during which Bitum follows the popular example. "When we are children we like to think of what we shall do when we grow to be men, and I always chose to teach people and help them. In the afternoons when Ngem and I used to sit together and talk thus — did I ever choose anything else? Do you believe they will ever let me teach school again?" So on and on — about his dreams and his performance and his poor young disappoint- ment. Not very much about his repentance, but enough. I feel it rather hopeless to let you in on our attitude. We take such a defection as this with a certain resignation — at least, some of us do. The sins of the flesh present a simpler aspect than you can realize, and in such a case as this do not inflict any social injury. The people at I pose are puzzled at a judgment which removes Bitum on such a charge; only the Chris- tians have any sense of the sin ; and this is more a reasonable inference from the law than any quick sense. I can't explain to you without minimizing their wish and intent to keep this Commandment, which they think as good as any other. Bitum 's trouble of soul has more to do with his disloyalty to Christ than with any sense of personal shame. He had meant to be obedient to his Master, and then he spoiled his service like a silly. We are having preparatory meetings this week; from where I sit I see his face, and I can't tell you how sometimes his poor bewildered boy heart looks out of his eyes. I seem never to have realized Bitum so com- pletely as now: his nervous animation, the grace of his sudden gestures, the eagerness of his youth, and his sudden calms of gentle, earnest attention. I suppose you think that I feel very badly about this; and I do feel badly, but not so much as you think. We people who have come out into the wilderness are not too quick to start at a reed shaken by the wind. Neither do I take this defection of a young Christian lad to contribute anything in particular to my ex- ceedingly vague ideas as to the possibilities of the African race — either the possibilities or the impossibilities. All this time I have been much occupied, — getting out of my room over into the Fords' house, — and I have been often weary. The Lehman children have a Bulu measles, and Mrs. Lehman is a much-worn woman; but I have had no leisure in which to help her, even if she had been of a mind to let me. Saturday night. Bitum has just left after two hours of such pathetic outpouring as would hurt you. At first he said he had five words to open for me, and he went at them in a sufficiently systematic fashion. But presently he was saying, "My heart is just dried up within me and my body is weak. If I sat with another man and there was food between us, he might have it all; and if I broke a kank and gave him half, my portion would fall to the ground before I would think to eat it. Every way I look I find no peace. The worst is that I cannot give up teaching school and that you won't take me back" (for I think it is best for him to go to his town until the next term of school, and then to do some- thing more hardy than my work). "I cannot run from these thoughts — they are with me all the time. I am surprised. I am like an animal that went away on a visit, and there was one who dug a pit for him, and the animal, return- ing, fell into the pit. He did not know of the pit — he fell in. I cannot see people as I used — something is wrong with my eyes. Now I walk as slowly as the chameleon, and so I will walk because of the evil which I was so quick to do. The path ahead is plain enough, but I am like a man who was walking, and something strikes him on the head from behind ; he cannot forget that blow — he wonders about it and who did it and will it happen again; for all the path is plain before him, his thoughts are all behind him." I cannot tell you all he said. I thought I had heard something similar before, so I began to read out of the Psalms, translating as I went along. There was the whole matter and the an- cient anguish, — David's tears gathered up in God's bottle so long ago, — and Bitum said, "I would say you were reading from the heart of a man!" Monday, November 12. Bitum said good-bye to me last night to leave this morning. More than when he went to Ipose I hated to see him go. I tell you, I suffered real pangs. It was Communion Sunday. He is, of course, stricken from the church roll. Very many people are here from Lam and Ipose, — I took all the time I could get to go about among the various huddles of them ; and in one Ipose group I found Bitum, giving last direc- tions to his flock, — how they were to conduct themselves, and achieve the Christian graces. The sad old women could hardly let him go. On Sunday he looked a nice proper Bulu youth in his white singlet and his bright cloth. On Saturday night, when we talked together, I had reproved him for his careless dress. " Have n't you anything decent in your box?" I had asked; and he had said, "Why, I have lots of things, but I can't bear to open the box; I think about how the body is more than raiment and the life than the body." I do hope he will be good now. He will go in my caravan to Elat and carry a load. If I could bring myself to feel it right to take him back, I would have so much comfort in him; but I know that he must go if he is to be a man. November 29. I foresee that you are going to feel sore be- cause I have had malaria again — but that is because you are so spoiled. You think there should be some sort of special dispensation for your lamb. It was what Mrs. Ford calls a "nor- mal little fever." I feel better to-night — quite well, indeed, but weak for a little. This is Thanksgiving, and every one has made a heroic effort to achieve a complete holiday atmos- phere. The united efforts have succeeded with a vengeance. Your child is adrift on a sea of desolate horizons — she is skeptical to a horrid degree and wonders whether it is really "very nice to think the world is full of meat and drink." I want you to be glad because my women are learning their letters. "Strange things," moans Anzhia; "one learns some to forget others." But I detect a permanent de- posit. My friends, my dears, — such as are on this side of the great oceans of sea, — are bitten with the fear that I am going away — myste- riously and without warning. They hesitate to ask me directly, — one wonders why, — but they fix me with a gaze all gloom and question. One boy came in last night to ask, most senti- mentally, would I let him see my father's hand- writing, which I did with a pardonable pride. I must tell you: I have achieved a new grace, enchanting to my friends and a relief, in a meas- ure, from a certain heavy sense of my lack of the common and essential virtues. When the women come to see me now, I rush to my water pail and dip a pitcherful. This, with a cup, I lay at their feet, and my manner is a miracle of hos- pitality. I stand back, and they beam at me ' 1 Thanks ! ' ' They sigh ; and the sigh is of a heart revived. They see the faint indication of a decent behavior, of a willing hospitality, and they think that I am coming, in spite of my blood, to be something more like a lady. They drink my water, leaning far over the cup, which they hold in midair and at arm's length, and we are all more happy than in those days when I had discovered no hole in the fence of mission policy, which is against the dispensing of bene- fits — and wisely so.