African Game Trails 
149 
missionary history. I saw the high-school, 
where the sons of the chiefs are being 
trained in large numbers for their future 
duties, and I was especially struck by the 
admirable. Medical Mission, and by the 
handsome cathedral, built by the native 
Christians themselves without outside as¬ 
sistance in either money or labor. At din¬ 
ner at Mr. Knowles’s, Bishop Tucker gave 
us exceedingly interesting details of his past 
experiences in Uganda, and of the prog¬ 
ress of the missionary work. He had been 
much amused by an 
American missionary 
who had urged him to 
visit America, saying 
that he would “find the 
latch-string outside the 
door”; to an American 
who knows the country 
districts well the ex¬ 
pression seems so nat¬ 
ural that I had never 
even realized that it 
was an Americanism. 
At Bishop Hanlon’s 
Mission, where I 
lunched with the bish¬ 
op, there was a friend, 
Mother Paul, an Amer¬ 
ican; 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 delight¬ 
ful seeing her; she not merely spoke my 
language but my neighborhood dialect. 
She informed me that she had just received 
a message 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 mes¬ 
sage 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 writing it out, 
to use spelling far more purely phonetic 
than I had ever dreamed of using. The 
first lines ran as follows: (Some of our word 
sounds have no equivalent in Uganda.) 
“ O se ka nyu si bai di mo nseii laiti 
(O say can you see by the morn’s (sic) early light) 
Wati so pulauli wi eli adi twayi laiti 
(What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s 
silasi giremi” 
last gleaming.) 
After having taught the children the first 
verse in this manner Mother Paul said that 
she stopped to avoid brain fever. 
In addition to scholastic exercises Moth¬ 
er Paul and her associates were training 
* For the benefit of those who do not live in the neighbor¬ 
hood 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 Ger¬ 
man descent he is usually a man bom out West of New 
England parentage. 
