Grief, however, is often very deep and real among the Africans; and it can never in any land be measured by conventionalities. The grief of parents for the loss of children is, as I have said, the most poignant grief of the African heart. Again and again, when I have asked a father or mother to explain to the session of the church their long absence from its services, they have confessed in tears that they had been unable to believe in the Christian’s God since He had taken away their little child—sometimes an only child—and had left the parent heart cold and joyless. One day, walking across the lonely _grass-field_ of Gaboon, the stillness broken only by the rustle of the long grass around me and the distant boom of the sea beyond the horizon, I met a man of Gaboon who was returning home after a trading expedition into the forest. He was a shrewd man who had traded successfully both with white and black and who seemed to care for nothing else but trade, a man of materialistic mind and peculiarly inaccessible to any spiritual message. We sat down and talked for some time, first of course about trade; but gradually the conversation became more intimate and he talked about himself, at length revealing a great sorrow that years ago had darkened his life and left it dark, like the setting of the sun. He had lost in succession three little children—all he had. He tried to tell me about it, but he had not accustomed himself to speaking of it, and the story ended half-way in a flood of tears. I told him that little story that every minister tells more than once in the course of his ministry—the story of the kind shepherd, and the willful mother sheep that would not cross the stream to the good pasture and the safe fold on the other side; and how the shepherd took the lamb in his arms and carried it across, and how the mother sheep stood a while and looked after it with longing and then followed her lamb to the other side. It was a familiar incident to him—some such thing he had done himself—and the simple story moved him deeply. I never saw him again; for I left Africa shortly afterwards. But I have not forgotten the human tenderness that was revealed beneath the surface hardness of the man’s heathen heart; and I hope that if he be still alive he may not have forgotten the vision of the “sweet fields beyond the swelling floods,” and the message of God’s love and kindness which he heard that day, like a still, small voice sounding across the storms that had wrecked his life.