Alone in West Africa. Mary Gaunt

of the western world. No one till this present generation seems to have recognised that she had any rights. Now we realise that the black man must be considered at least as much as the white man, who has made himself his master. Now most settlements along the Coast are busy, prosperous, and, above all, sanitary. Only in Liberia, the civilised black man's own country, does a different state of things prevail; only here has the movement been retrograde.

      An end must come, but who can say what this end will be.

      The missionary girl who had given up all she held most dear, who had joined the noble band of martyrs and heroes for Africa, said she had done so because she had seen a letter from a black man just mentioning a chapter and verse of the New Testament. She had looked it up and read the prayer of the Macedonians. Strange, strange are the workings of the Unseen, cruel sometimes the penalties poor human nature takes upon itself. Who shall say that a Guiding Hand had not made that girl choose wisely for the development of her own character, and who shall say that some ultimate good may not yet come for beautiful, wealthy, poverty-stricken Liberia. That the civilised nations, sinking their own jealousies, may step in and save her despite herself, I think, is the only hope. But it must be as Paul would have saved, not as the pitiful Christ. For the pendulum has swung too far back; the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. She does not know it herself, she will resent bitterly the imputation, but to me Liberia seems to be stretching out her hands crying dumbly to the white man the cry that came across the water of old, the cry the missionary girl listened to, the cry of Macedonia, “Come over and help us.”

      But I was one who only heard the cry in passing, who felt that I at least could not help. I went on in the Chama to Axim, interested with what I had seen, but forgetting much in what I thought was to be my first hammock-trip alone. For I wanted to go to Half Assinie, and since no one may be sure of landing all their gear in safety on that surf-bound coast, I had to land at Axim and go back overland the fifty miles to the French border, and I thought I should have to do it alone.