As Mary sat, tired with her week's work, in her pew in the church on Sunday, and thought of Livingstone's call to Africa, she saw visions of far-off places of which she heard from the pulpit and read in her magazines--visions of a steaming river on the West Coast of Africa where the alligators slid from the mud banks into the water; visions of the barracoons on the shore in which the captured negroes were penned as they waited for the slave-ships; pictures of villages where trembling prisoners dipped their hands in boiling oil to test their guilt, and wives were strangled to go with their dead chief into the spirit-land; visions of the fierce chiefs who could order a score of men to be beheaded for a cannibal feast and then sell a hundred more to be hounded away into the outer darkness of slavery--the Calabar where the missionaries of her church were fighting the black darkness of the most savage people of the world. Mary Slessor made up her mind to go out and give her whole life to Africa. So she offered herself, a timorous girl who could not cross a field with a cow in it, as a missionary for cannibal Calabar, in West Africa. For twelve years she worked at the centre of the mission in Calabar and then flung herself into pioneer work among the terrible tribe of Okoyong. No one had ever been able to influence them. They defied British administration. For fifteen years she strove there, and won a power over the ferocious Okoyong savages such as no one has ever wielded. "I'm a wee, wee wifie," she said, "no very bookit, but I grip on well none the less." To-day over two thousand square miles of forest and rivers, the dark savages, as they squat at night in the forest around their palaver-fires, tell one another stories of the Great-White-Ma-Who-Lived-Alone, and the stories they tell are like these. II. THE HEALING OF THE CHIEF _Through the Forest in the Rain_ A strange quiet lay over all the village by the river. For the chief lay ill in his hut. The Calabar people were waiting on the tip-toe of suspense. For if the chief died many of them would be slain to go with him into the spirit-world--his wives and some of his soldiers and slaves. Suddenly a strange African woman, who had come over from another village, entered the chief's harem. She spoke to the wives of the chief, saying, "There lives away through the forest at Ekenge a white Ma who can cast out by her magic the demons who are killing your chief. My son's child was dying, but the white Ma[57] saved her and she is well to-day. Many other wonders has she done by the power of her juju. Let your chief send for her and he will not die." There was silence and then eager chattering, for the women knew that their very lives depended on the chief getting well. If he died, they would be killed. They sent in word to the chief about the strange white Ma. "Let her be sent for," he ordered. "Send a bottle and four rods (value about a shilling) and messengers to ask her to come."