In Afric’s Forest and Jungle 
jects, they would have broader and more en¬ 
lightened views, and would not be so quickly 
infatuated with all sorts of fanciful notions and 
vagaries current among many of the cultured in 
enlightened countries. 
It is one of the merited punishments inflicted 
on those who allow science, literature and the 
news of the day to make them neglect the Bible, 
that they are left to grope in spiritual darkness, 
to believe the most absurd things, and, in all 
sorts of ways, to make fools of themselves until 
even those who have emerged from paganism 
regard them with amazement, if not with 
contempt. 
But the Bible was not by any means the only 
text-book when they had learned sufficient 
English to take up a course of study in that 
language. As the English spoken by the average 
Sierra Leone people at that time was “pigeon 
English,” I much preferred to hear their own 
musical language and did not encourage them to 
speak a mutilated form of my own. It was 
quite ridiculous when they first began to adopt 
the dress and manners of the white man in 
preference to those of their own people. In full 
dress, they always wore creaking shoes, and the 
more racket these made, the better they liked 
2 SO 
