Return to the River. 
1 77 
bran or straw, if there be nothing better-—any¬ 
thing, in fact, is preferable to allowing the shrink¬ 
age which ends in this wretched caricature. 
During my stay at Glass Town I was fortunate 
enough to make the acquaintance of the Rev. 
Messrs. Walker and Preston, of the Baraka Mis¬ 
sion. The head-quarter station of the American 
Board of Foreign (Presbyterian) Missions was 
established on the Gaboon River in 1842 by the 
Rev. J. Leighton Wilson, afterwards one of the 
secretaries to the Society in New York. He had 
left the best of memories in “ the River,” and there 
were tales of his having manumitted in the South¬ 
ern U nited States a small fortune of slaves without 
a shade of compulsion. His volume on West 
Africa, to which allusion has so often been made, 
contains a good bird’s-eye of the inter-tropical 
coast, and might, with order, arrangement, and 
correction of a host of minor inaccuracies, become 
a standard work. 
I have already expressed my opinion, founded 
upon a sufficiently long experience, that the U nited 
States missionary is by far the best man for the 
Western Coast, and, indeed, for dangerous tropical 
countries generally. Physically he is spare and 
hard, the nervous temperament being more strongly 
developed in him than in the bulbous and more 
bilious or sanguine European. He is better born, 
and blood never fails to tell. Again, he generally 
1. 
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