376 
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
‘'find the latch-string outside the door’’; to an American 
who knows the country districts well the expression seems 
so natural that I had never even realized that it was an 
Americanism. 
At Bishop Hanlon’s Mission, where I lunched with the 
bishop, there was a friend. Mother Paul, an American; 
before I left America I had promised that I would surely see 
her, and look into the work which she, and the sisters associ¬ 
ated with her, were doing. It was delightful seeing her; she 
not merely spoke my language but my neighborhood dia¬ 
lect. She informed me that she had just received a mes¬ 
sage of good will for me in a letter from two of “the finest” 
—of course I felt at home when in mid-Africa, under the 
equator, I received in such fashion a message from two 
of the men who had served under me in the New York 
police.* She had been teaching her pupils to sing some 
lines of the “Star-spangled Banner,” in English, in my 
especial honor; and of course had been obliged, in writ¬ 
ing it out, to use spelling far more purely phonetic than I 
had ever dreamed of using. The first lines ran as fol¬ 
lows: (Some of our word sounds have no equivalent in 
Uganda.) 
“O se ka nyu si bai di mo nseli laid 
(O say can you see by die morn’sf early light) 
Wati so pulauli wi eli adi twayi laiti silasi giremi’^ 
(What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming.) 
* For the benefit of those who do not live in the neighborhood of New York I 
may explain that all good, or typical, New Yorkers invariably speak of their police 
force as “the finest’’; and if any one desires to know what a “good” or “typical” 
New Yorker is, I shall add, on the authority of either Brander Matthews or the 
late H. C. Bunner—I forget which—that when he isn’t a Southerner or of Irish 
or German descent he is usually a man born out West of New England parentage, 
t sic. 
