Yet M'tesa and his men still wondered why any man should work hard. Mackay tried to explain this to the King when he sat in his reception-hall. Work, Mackay told M'tesa, is the noblest thing a man can do, and he told him how Jesus Christ, the Son of the Great Father-Spirit who made all things, did not Himself feel that work was a thing too mean for Him. For our Lord, when He lived on earth at Nazareth, worked with His own hands at the carpenter's bench, and made all labour forever noble. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 53: August 23, 1878.] [Footnote 54: The people of Uganda.] CHAPTER XX FIGHTING THE SLAVE TRADE _Alexander Mackay_ (Date, 1878) In the court of King M'tesa, Mackay always saw many boys who used to drive away the flies from the King's face with fans, carry stools for the chiefs and visitors to squat upon, run messages and make themselves generally useful. Most of these boys were the sons of chiefs. When they were not occupied with some errand, they would lounge about playing games with one another in the open space just by the King's hut. Often when Mackay came to speak with the King, he had to wait in this place before he could have audience of M'tesa. He would bring with him large sheets of paper on which he had printed in his workshop the alphabet and some sentences. The printing was actually done with the little hand-press that Mackay had used in his attic when he was a boy in his old home in Rhynie. He had taken it with him all the way to Uganda, and now was setting up letters and sentences in a language which had never been printed before. The Baganda boys who had gathered round the White-Man-of-Work with wondering eyes, as he with his "magic" printed the sheets of paper, now crowded about him as he unrolled one of these white sheets with the curious black smudges on them. Mackay made the noise that we call A and then B, and pointed to these curious-shaped objects which we call the letters of the alphabet. Then he got them to make the noise and point to the letter that represented that sound. At last the keenest of the boys really could repeat the alphabet right through and begin to read whole words from another sheet--Baganda words--so that at length they could read whole sentences. Two of these pioneer boys became very good scholars. One named Mukasa became a Christian and was baptised with the name Samweli (Samuel); another called Kakumba was baptised Yusufu (Joseph). A third boy had been captured from a tribe in the north, and his skin was of a much lighter brown than that of the Baganda boys. This light-skinned captured slave was named Lugalama. Each of these boys felt that it was a very proud day when at last he could actually read a whole sheet of printing from beginning to end in his own language--from "Our Father" down to "the Kingdom, the power and the glory, Amen."