After leaving Kamerun I still kept track of Lolo. Others followed me who were at least as good to him as I was; and it is a great satisfaction to know that he did not grow up into a savage. And yet of such stuff are savages made. Hamlet, in the churchyard, reflecting sadly upon the base uses to which our bodies may return, observes that imagination may trace the noble dust of Alexander till one finds it stopping a bung-hole; and that “Imperius Cæsar, dead and turned to clay, May stop a hole to keep the wind away.” It is a matter for at least as grave reflection that out of the same living boy may be made the bloodthirsty savage, or the kind of man which is called “the noblest work of God.” Which of the two a boy is destined to become depends somewhat on whether his name happens to be _Lolo_, or _John_. It was years after that I opened, at Baraka, in the French Congo, a boarding-school for Fang boys. At the beginning of the term I gathered the boys and brought them to Baraka with the _Dorothy_. The mountain does not come to Mahomet, so Mahomet goes and fetches it. As they were scattered over the entire area of the great Fang field, the opening of the school was a formidable labour of two weeks; and it was also the most exhausting and trying experience of the whole year. For these two weeks were spent not in actual travel, but nearly all of it in the towns in red-hot contentions with the parents of the boys, who at the first were always unwilling to let them come to the school. In the more remote towns many of them suspected that I wanted to sell the boys into slavery, or even to kill them for some unknown purpose. There were days, before the school was well known, when I was utterly disheartened by their continual refusal, in town after town, to let me have their boys, though there were many bright lads in most of the towns. The boys themselves would have come; the trouble was with their parents. Sometimes I was constrained to say that the parental institution was an intolerable nuisance; or, at least, that the African child might well envy the blessed Melchizedek who was without father or mother. But orphans are not to be found. Each child has a score of parents; for a child’s parents include all his uncles and aunts even several degrees removed. The child of course knows his own parents and makes a difference between them and the rest; but he addresses them all as “Father” or “Mother,” and they divide parental authority among them, all taking a hand in the child’s bringing-up: and it must be admitted that no better way could be devised for bringing up a first-class savage.