LIFE AND LABOURS ON THE UPPER CONGO. 1 23 
graciously with our beloved Congo Mission, with its 
work and its staff. It is terrible to read the statistics of 
our contemporaries — the Livingstone Inland Mission 
and the African International Association — Stanley's. 
They are as follows (reckoning Grenfell and his three 
new hands expected to arrive at Banana) : — 
B.M.S. Loss by Death, i. Returned, o. In Africa, ii. Total, 12. 
L.LIM. „ 8. „ 14* i> 15* ?> 37* 
A. LA. ,, II. „ 14* >j 37* 
Does it not seem marvellous, God's care of and good- 
ness to us ? " 
On Mr. Bentley's return to Manyanga, Mr. Comber 
was set free, and went up again to the Pool to begin 
building operations ; the Belgians receiving him with 
their former kindness. He soon made friends with 
the people round about, and put up the framework of 
a house ; but when he had partly thatched the roof, he 
was overtaken with a fever, similar to that at Isangila 
and San Salvador. By this illness he was hindered a 
month, but towards the end of November he had fully 
recovered, and was able to complete and take posses- 
sion of his new house, and proceed to the erection of 
other necessary buildings. 
“ Fancy ! ” Mr. Comber wrote to his father, on the 
27th of December, “ Fancy ! your letters came on 
Christmas day. I was expecting a caravan, and per- 
haps Bentley, on that day (he had been alone for two 
months), and just as dinner was getting ready I walked 
out a little way along the Manyanga road, spied the 
Union Jack of my caravan from Manyanga, and got 
my letters — though no Bentley arrived. Dinner was 
a failure altogether. A leg of a goat, who might have 
been 100 years old, baked in a baking-pot with sage 
and onions — all dried up to a cinder, and as tough as 
an old bachelor hippopotamus, a little boiled fish, the 
numerous bones of which threatened to choke me, and 
a Morton's plum-pudding. Fact is, I had no appetite. 
I 'd read, whilst eating my fish, the letters from my 
