"'Ye'll excuse my hands,' she said, and she held them out. "They were hardened and roughened by work, work in the past, and they were just now bleeding from work finished but now; the skin of the palms was gone, the nails were worn to the quick; that they were painful there could be no doubt, but she only apologised for their appearance." "Ma" is thus made to tell the incident of the witness dying suddenly after attending the court at Ikotobong: "'If you put _mbiam_ on a man and he swears falsely he dies. Oh, he does. I ken it. I've seen it mysel'. There was a man brought up before me in the court and he was charged wi' stealing some plantains. He said he had naught to do with them, so I put _mbiam_ on him, an' still he said he had naught to do wi' them, so I sent him down to Calabar. An' see now. As he was going he stopped the policeman an' laid himself down, because he was sick. An' he died. He died there. I put _mbiam_ on him, an' he knew he had stolen them and died.' "There was pity in her face for the man she had killed with his own lie, but only pity, no regret." So well was she succeeding with her mystification that she went on to talk of the hard lot of women and "the puir bairns," and then comes the conclusion: "'My time's been wasted. The puir bairns. They'd be better dead.' "Her scarred hands fumbled with her dress, her tired eyes looked out into the blazing tropical sunshine, her lips quivered as she summed up her life's work. 'Failed, failed,' she cried. All that she had hoped, all that she had prayed for, nothing for herself had she ever sought except the power to help these children, and she felt that she had not helped them. They would be better dead.... "But the Commissioner did not think she had failed. Is the victory always to the strong? "'She has influence and weight,' he said 'she can go where no white man dare go. She can sway the people when we cannot sway them. Because of her they are not so hard on the twins and their mothers as they used to be. No, she has not failed.'" And so with a reference to Thermopylae, and the Coliseum and Smithfield, the lady litterateur places her in the ranks of the immortal martyrs of the world. XVII. THE SETTLEMENT BEGUN