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BLACK SHEEP

POSTSCRIPT: THE LAST JOURNEY

BY JEAN KENYON MACKENZIE

MEJUN, WEST AFRICA, July 17. I AM about seventy miles southeast of Elat, in a forlorn little town of the Yemvae tribe; got in this afternoon after a run through the forest from Ekwen. Left Miss Eick at the crossroads. She is having a good time, I think. The people are devoted to her; the path she is going is an Elat path; many Christians are in the towns, simple folk who love her. These new people have something to give the black people that we older missionaries have lost a kind of personal response to their wonder, and a pleasure in their wonder that is worn away in time. Many of the people here have never seen a white woman before. The women laugh at us so much. One clapped her hands with pleasure and said, "The little talk of her and the little voice and all!'

There are rats 'too much' in this house, and I shall be hearing the little talk and the little voices and all as soon as I turn out the light. Gracious sakes, my dears, they begin already and badun ane bột ! 1

A girl asked me to-night if I knew a charm to give her a child. I have been asked this several times lately.

MASAN, Saturday, July 19. Another rather dreadful town where I shall stay until Monday. When I get into a dreary town like this, I think how satisfied Miss D. would be to see 1 'They are as noisy as people.'

me in surroundings as low as she suspects them to be.

Two women have been standing at the door looking at me. I am lying on my cot. They double up with laughter. One says (she is eating), 'Here I stand and my plantain cannot find the path to my mouth for wonder!' And when I told them my mother had borne six children, she said, 'All with bodies like you? Not a black one in all?' They surely would have thought themselves cursed with such a brood.

Wednesday, July 23.

On Monday night we slept in the Ntum town of Wo'o. A large town full of waggish old men, full of interest in sex and the humor of that interest, like old French libertines. The men do not wear the headdress any more, but the women are all coiffed. A very beautiful art, I think, very becoming and curiously modifying to the face, so that the face of a Ntum woman, under its casque of brass studs and bead fringe, bridled through the nose with strings of blue or rose beads that pass back of the ear, and strapped across the forehead with a band of beads, the face of the Ntum woman has a curiously disciplined and softened aspect, a kind of touching submission. I notice this very generally, and Miss E. notices it too. At this town we had quite a success of curiosity. Miss Eick's bicycle was a great wonder. 'And so the white man

has white women,' cries one silly; 'I thought the tribe were just men, men!'

Sunday, August 3.

Three old ladies sit watching me where I lie on my cot. One says, 'So new!' Another says, 'So fresh!' The last says, 'Like a thing newborn!'

I am staying under the eaves of a very grand house. There is a kind of porch fenced in with slats of bamboo, and there are twenty pairs of eyes looking through the slats, children on their hands and knees and bigger ones higher up. I am tired of weeks of this.

I want to write very particularly of Wednesday, July 23, for I suppose I shall never pass another such day. We slept Tuesday night near the fork of the Ntem and the Kom, in a very quiet little settlement. We had a little town to ourselves and rested. Walked to a village in the afternoon, where I had a meeting. On Wednesday we walked through two hours of forest, real forest, but good walking,—a trail, not a path. Lots of elephants had passed within a few days, and we saw the fresh tracks of a gorilla. Afterward we heard from the people that the gorilla, or more than one, had been seen that day. At about ten o'clock we came into the deserted villages of Mengama. In the palaver house a man sat by a bit of fire. My funny Ebolo in his tattered, his really catastrophic trousers, found an old harp in a house. He put aside his load, the kitchen load, all pots and pans, and was a new man. He sang our adventures in a beautiful voice- a mock sentimental voice, all laughter and bathos, and mellow, mocking tremolo. I loved him for it. It was a purple patch, a ragged purple patch in the garment of the journey.

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Another stretch of forest and we came into the new clearing of Asok. Later in the day I came back to this place. In the middle of the leafy dis

order of his clearing the headman sat in his little shelter a young man, heavily braceleted with ivory. There were lots of men in this settlement, and presently many women gathered, all bustled and coiffed, and some rubbed with red powder. Every one was busy: men making furniture for the new town, women knotting little nets, shelling peanuts, grinding corn; and all this individual industry going forward in a kind of common gayety. I think I never saw SO how shall I give you an idea- so harmonious a scene. As I spoke to these people about the things of God there came a pause in the industry. The tool was arrested. The hands of the women bruising green leaves in wooden troughs and the grinders at the stones were idle. Men laughed with a kind of wonder. One woman flashed with interest behind her mask of purple tattoo and bright beads. Another bridled young thing gazed in a great stillness. I see this thing in my heart like a thing shut in from time and change, and I wish that I may never forget it.

We spoke of the new Tribe and of its Chief. Mba came to take me home, for he had heard tales of gorillas. The women followed me to say good-bye; they ran ahead shouting about the Commandments - these people dote on commandments. And these brown creatures headed like flowers were crying to each other, 'Don't steal. Don't commit adultery. Don't kill.' I have seen so much that is sordid, so much that is vile, that I cannot think when I have seen an hour so unspoiled as this, though in 'those days and in those streets,' as Galsworthy says, there must be deeds of horror.

In Wo'o, where one felt the horror very near, there was a beautiful creature, a young woman with four red pompons in her headdress. Her body was rubbed with red powder; it was

young and fine. There is a bloom of light on the outline of a body so covered, and in the shadows there is something luminous too. Strange, morbid beauty!

I am scribbling beside a wood fire in our little camp. A plantain roasts in the ashes for your child. An animal, some frightened little thing, has just crashed through the underbrush near by.

LOLODORF, Monday, August 11. Well, my dears, I am back since Thursday from what I think to have been a good trip, as good as I could have wished. Gone forty-six days, and traveled four hundred and perhaps forty miles. I think I wrote from Ekin, where we camped three nights; left there on Monday morning and were glad to leave, after the ungrateful fashion of transients. We walked until one o'clock the next day, part of the time in the forest, but mostly now on a quite open path, for we were coming out at Ambam, the government post for the Ntum. We slept at Kulezok. We were awfully tired that day. In one of these settlements near Ambam we came on some Efulen people, who were mighty glad to see us, and called one to the other, 'Ah Obam, Ah Bilo'o, come and see the faces of home!'

Now that we had got back to the neighborhood of the white man, the people were ruder, but as curious as ever. In the afternoon I went to see Frau Mülling, the wife of the military officer in charge at Ambam, about an hour's walk from the town in which we slept. I sent Mba Esone to tell her that I would call; in such an out-of-the-way part of the world she could not be looking for callers. Ambam is a cluster of bark houses on a long hill; the houses lie along the crest, a rather noble and leisurely effect. The dwelling house is quite one of the most satisfactory I have seen in Africa - big windows let

into the bark walls, no curtains, the floor covered with a coarse bamboo matting. Frau Mülling came half way down the hill to meet me, pretty and friendly. Her husband was away looking after the disorders across the Ntem; he was to be gone the night. She showed me into a room where there was a real bed, my dears, made up with an extravagance of linen. My room, she told me, and was much disappointed because I could not stay. She took me part of the way back, "a mile and a bittock," with a soldier to follow us because dusk was closing in and she was afraid of leopards.

The road west of Ambam to the beach is beautiful, open but not too open. In a village by the way I had a half-hour session with a proud blacksmith, the Ntum are great blacksmiths, and we parted with tears, or nearly. 'We men,' said he, 'love to tell tales in the palaver house, and when we are telling our tales, where is the ring I will be showing the other men to prove that the white woman and I, we are friends?' 'If you speak of tales,' said I, 'I love to tell a tale myself, and where is the present you will be giving me to show my friends when I say that I and the blacksmith from Akumbetye, we are friends?' More of such gentle hints, followed by an exchange of keepsakes. Brass for ivory, and some magic in the ivory too.

When we came out of the forest at about three o'clock, into the sunny upland valley of Nyabet, I met a happy man who had killed a monkey. He carried the most beautiful crossbow I have ever seen, and he carried it with the most noble gesture. 'Tis a grand thing to kill a monkey; you rush home in a little wind of victory. I bought that crossbow the next day.

I spent Sunday at Mesamba. On Monday we cut up through the forest to Mfenda, and from there to Nkotoven,

all day in bilik and bekotok - that is, old deserted clearing; nothing so hard to go through. And it rained. I got into Nkotoven, Bululand, at five o'clock. 'Zamo Ntem,' I call, and old Zamo sits up in her house.

"That little voice,' she says, 'where have I heard that little voice before?' 'Zamo!'

And Zamo comes out slowly, blinking, and then quickly and puts her arms around me and cries on my sleeve, because old Minkoe Ntem, her sister and my friend, is dead. And they told her at Efulen that I was gone beyond the seas. The owner of that little voice is embraced by many old friends. Zamo cannot sit down to chat; she has guests to feed. She leaves plantains in the kettle for my carriers, and is off to beg a chicken for her dear child. Poor old

woman she goes far for her chicken; at ten I put out the light and go to sleep, Zamo still away. The young wives of her husband lie down and sleep too. They are Christians, children of the childless Zamo. She is a wonderful person, with hundreds of converts to fill her heart.

In the morning we parted and I had a chicken all my own. She was going to show me a great piece of path, but the old legs got tired. She went too far for the chicken. That day we went through the Mebem bilik, not bad. Ate fine pawpaws in a little clearing about a palm tree. Spent the night at Minkan in our own territory, where the people came far to hear us through the night and the rain by the light of reed torches. I think I shall never see old Zamo again.

(The End.)

GUESTS

BY LAURA SPENCER PORTOR

I

In his essay on 'Character' Emerson points to the mutation and change of religions and theological teachings, and then thunders characteristically, 'The moral sentiment alone is omnipotent.' Now, Emerson never takes away anything traditional and cherished, but he puts something nobler into your hands in place of it. Hear him: 'The lines of religious sects are very shifting, their platforms unstable; the whole science of theology of great uncertainty. No

VOL. 117 - NO. 2

man can tell what religious revolutions await us in the next years.' Then with thundering assurance he gives us the coveted reassurance. 'But the science of ethics has no mutation. The pulpit may shake, but this platform will not. All the victories of religion belong to the moral sentiment.'

I wish it were given me to speak with some such force and truth of what we are wont to call education. Theories are very shifting; the whole science of instruction is of great uncertainty. No man can tell what pedagogic revolutions

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In still another essay Emerson, depicting, we suppose, the ideal not the academic scholar, declares with the same tonic forcefulness that 'his use of books is occasional and infinitely subordinate; that he should read a little proudly, as one who knows the original and cannot therefore very highly value the copy.' Always, life is to Emerson the greater art, and learning, literature, and all other arts whatsoever, but lesser things. 'You send your child to the schoolmaster,' he flings out, 'but it is the schoolboys who educate him.'

Precisely. When shall we have taken wholly to heart the so obvious truth? It cannot be but the author of the 'Greatest Show on Earth' was right. The world likes to be humbugged; else why all this elaboration of educational systems and theories, educational forms and creeds, this multiplication of modern methods and 'didactic material'? These are, indeed, but things that change and fluctuate, and already are on the way to being superseded. Meanwhile the older and larger schoolroom of Life never closes its doors, makes no bid for patronage, retains its old teachers, changes its methods not at all, and still turns out the best pupils.

My own education is generally thought to be above the average. It is my belief that it would be far less considerable but for those various circumstances which in my childhood denied me much schooling, and accorded me a good deal of staying at home.

The home of those days had, it is true, a far greater educative value than can be claimed justly for the home of the present day, owing mainly-I hold it almost beyond dispute to the fact

that it was more given to the practice of hospitality and the entertainment of guests.

Of the homes of my day my own was, I believe, fairly typical. Though a full description of it and of the men and women who frequented it would make a colored recital, so would a like description of the homes of many others besides myself who were children also at that time. I do not mean that such homes were entirely the rule; yet there were enough of them certainly to constitute a type.

Such homes were not luxurious; those of people of less position nowadays are far finer. The old house was a large and comfortable one, with lowceilinged, well-proportioned rooms, and wide verandas. Its furnishings were in taste, and contributed greatly to its character. The big Holland secretary, with its bulging sides and secret drawer, was a very piece of romance; the tall clock with its brass balls and moon face, the old clawfoot mahogany tables, the long scroll sofa, the heavy scroll mahogany sideboard, were as mellow in tone as the old Martin guitar on which men and women, beaux and belles of a past generation, had played; or the harp that stood in a corner, all gold in the afternoon sunlight; or the square Steck piano of the front room, a true grandee in its day. Several really well-painted portraits looked down from the walls and added a certain stateliness to the warmth of every welcome.

Many people, recalling that home, have spoken to me since of a peculiarly warm and beautiful light which on sunny days was present in the three lower rooms-parlor, sitting-room, and dining-room that opened one into another.

This light, which had first to make its way past maples and a few pear trees, entered, it seemed, with an especial graciousness, touching softly and

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