My sicknesses were frequent, and, during my first attacks of African fever, I took up the Bible to while away the tedious, feverish hours in bed. Though incapacitated from the march, my temperature being constantly at 105° Fahr., it did not prevent me from reading, when not light-headed. I read Job, and then the Psalms; and when I recovered and was once more in marching state, I occupied my mind in camp in glancing at the newspaper intelligence; and then, somehow or another, my views towards newspapers were entirely recast; not as regards my own profession, which I still esteemed very highly, perhaps too highly, but as to the use and abuse of newspapers. Solitude taught me many things, and showed newspapers in quite a new light. There were several subjects treated in a manner that wild nature seemed to scorn. It appeared to me that the reading of anything in the newspapers, except that for which they were intended, namely news, was a waste of time; and deteriorative of native force, and worth, and personality. The Bible, however, with its noble and simple language, I continued to read with a higher and truer understanding than I had ever before conceived. Its powerful verses had a different meaning, a more penetrative influence, in the silence of the wilds. I came to feel a strange glow while absorbed in its pages, and a charm peculiarly appropriate to the deep melancholy of African scenery. When I laid down the book, the mind commenced to feed upon what memory suggested. Then rose the ghosts of bygone yearnings, haunting every cranny of the brain with numbers of baffled hopes and unfulfilled aspirations. Here was I, only a poor journalist, with no friends, and yet possessed by a feeling of power to achieve! How could it ever be? Then verses of Scripture rang iteratingly through my mind as applicable to my own being, sometimes full of promise, often of solemn warning. Alone in my tent, unseen of men, my mind laboured and worked upon itself, and nothing was so soothing and sustaining as when I remembered the long-neglected comfort and support of lonely childhood and boyhood. I flung myself on my knees, and poured out my soul utterly in secret prayer to Him from whom I had been so long estranged, to Him who had led me here mysteriously into Africa, there to reveal Himself, and His will. I became then inspired with fresh desire to serve Him to the utmost, that same desire which in early days in New Orleans filled me each morning, and sent me joyfully skipping to my work.