46 AFRICAN CAMP FIRES. 



thrust jaw ; informed with the widest and most 

 understanding humanity, but unforgiving of 

 evildoers ; and with the most direct and abso- 

 lute courage, Bwana C. was to me the most in- 

 teresting man I met in Africa, and became the 

 best of my friends. 



The only other man at our table happened to 

 be, for our sins, the young Englishman mentioned 

 as throwing the first coin to the old woman on 

 the pier at Marseilles. We will call him Brown, 

 and, because he represents a type, he is worth 

 looking upon for a moment. 



He was of the super-enthusiastic sort ; bub- 

 bling over with vitality, in and out of everything ; 

 bounding up at odd and languid moments. To 

 an extraordinary extent he was afflicted with the 

 spiritual blindness of his class. Quite genuinely, 

 quite seriously, he was unconscious of the human 

 significance of beings and institutions belonging 

 to a foreign country or even to a class other 

 than his own. His own kind he treated as com- 

 plete and understandable human creatures. All 

 others were merely objective. As we, to a cer- 

 tain extent, happened to fall in the former cate- 

 gory, he was as pleasant to us as possible 

 that is, he was pleasant to us in his way, but 

 had not insight enough to guess at how to be 



