After some months of this work, which we all hate, I heard the news that my white man had returned to our country. “Now,” thought I, “all will be well. I will go and plead with him, and beg him to redeem me from this slavery, and then I will work for him again.” So when I took my next lot of rubber in to the white man, after receiving my three spoonfuls of salt in return for my basket of rubber balls, I went on to see the other white men. It was true, the white man for whom I had worked had arrived while we were in the forest, and was just settled down to work again. When he and his wife saw me they gave me a hearty welcome, evidently thinking that I, like so many others, had just called to welcome them back to our land. He knew nothing of what had taken place in his absence. I told him all my story, everything that had happened to me and mine while he was in Europe; and asked him, now that he had returned, to redeem me from my slavery, and let me come back and work for him again. But new white men had come and new rules had been made since his departure from our land, and again it was not permissible for a man holding a rubber book to take service with any one. All my hopes were dashed to the ground; but still I pleaded with him with all the fluency of which I was capable—he had done it before, and if then, why not now? We can understand white men making rules for black, but how can they interfere with each other? I thought that, if I only kept at it long enough, I should surely win. But at last I was convinced of the truth of the statement, and I wept. Yes, strong man as I was, I wept; for anger and sorrow were in my heart, and I turned to the white man as I stood there on the grass outside his house. “White man,” said I, “if this is true, there is no hope for me. It will be nothing but rubber until I die, and rubber is death. Dig a grave here, and bury me now! I may as well be buried in my grave as go on working rubber.” And I meant it. But back to rubber I had to go, with no hope of ever doing anything else; back into a slavery which would last until death, and from which there is no escape. For if you run away from one district, you only reach another, and another white man as eager for rubber as the one you left. Then he will make you work for him, if he does nothing worse; he may send you back, and then—chicotte, prison, and more rubber! So I and my people went on day after day, and month after month, with little pay (what we did receive was only a mockery of the word), no comfort, no home life, constant anxiety as to our wives and daughters in the villages, and nothing to look forward to for our sons but that they must follow in our steps, and of necessity become rubber workers as soon as, or even before, they were old enough to have sufficient strength for the work.