1 94 
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 
diversifying the grey scrub and sombre forest, and these clearly indicate the 
existence of plantations, while the vicinity of man is proved by occasional 
puffs and spirals of blue smoke where the natives are burning weeds. The 
path, too, is clearer, wider, and better made ; the obtrusive wayside vegetation 
has been checked and no longer impedes your progress. Then you begin to 
meet occasional inhabitants of the distant unseen settlements—women with 
babies slung on their backs and earthen pitchers poised on their heads on 
their way to the spring to obtain their evening supply of water; or men 
returning from the chase armed with long-barrelled ancient-looking guns, 
spears, assegais, or clubs, and accompanied by several snarling curs, whose 
collars are hung with little bells. To your surprise, instead of plunging 
terror stricken into the bush or assuming a defiant and hostile attitude, each 
native greets you politely with 
“ Morning ! Goo’ morning ! ” for 
they have learned from the mis¬ 
sionaries our matutinal salutation, 
which they indifferently make use 
of at all hours of the day and 
night. On each side of the widened 
road a straggling row of young 
plantain trees begins to make its 
appearance, evidently planted with 
the view of its forming ultimately 
a shady avenue : then behind a 
wooden fence appear thriving 
plantations of vegetables and 
hedges of pine-apples, and at last, 
a turn in the road brings into 
view a garden of flowers and 
flowering shrubs — blazing with 
brilliant masses of colour—and a long, low-built dwelling house of one storey, 
with white-washed walls, green window shutters, and a wide overhanging roof 
of thatch forming a verandah round the building. Behind the house are other 
dwellings of a humbler architecture, more or less hidden with green shrubs 
and trees ; and further in the background is a huge barn-like building, also 
white-washed and with a thatched roof, but having about it an indefinably 
ecclesiastical air, and this is certain to be a church, possibly used as a school 
also during the week. 
As you are toiling up the red path towards the house, taking in all these 
details with slow and tired comprehension, there comes towards you, half 
striding, half running, a white man whose outward presentment is something 
like the building you have taken for a chapel—a sort of compromise between 
homely rusticity and ecclesiastical primness. Probably he wears a large 
soft, grey felt hat with a broad brim, a crumpled white tie, a long grey 
clerical coat, cut close up to the neck, grey breeches and gaiters, and heavy 
boots. His face has homely features, but it is pleasantly lit up with an 
expression of hearty kindliness. 
Behind your new acquaintance — who has introduced himself to you as 
the agent of some well-known British Protestant mission—follow half-a-dozen 
loutish boys, mostly clad in gay coloured jerseys or shirts, with Manchester 
cottons round their lower limbs, one or two more favoured ones being 
