The very towns in which these boys lived became different from all other towns. A stranger travelling with me from town to town would surely notice the difference. These boys became without doubt the greatest evangelistic force in the Fang field. Africans are natural orators; and even the small boy has not the least difficulty in expressing his thoughts appropriately. Whatever religious truth I taught the schoolboys they in turn taught their people when they returned home. They did what neither myself, nor any other white man, could ever have done. Boys of twelve years, or even ten, gathered the people of their towns around them, both old and young and taught them reading and whatever they had learned of arithmetic. This is a matter of observation and astonishment in all mission fields in Africa. And all Africans have this beautiful childlike quality that they are teachable—a quality that Jesus must have had in mind when He set a child in the midst of the disciples as the symbol of Christian attainment. The biggest African chief will sit on the ground and listen to the small boy, so long as the small boy knows anything worth while that the chief does not know. XIII THE MENTAL DEGRADATION OF FETISHISM No; it was not among the Negroes, but among the peasants of Germany that the horseshoe acquired its power of luck. One day very long ago, in a German village, an honest blacksmith was hard at work making a horseshoe when the devil, strolling about the village, was attracted by the hammering. While looking on at the blacksmith it occurred to him that it might be a very good thing to get his own hoofs shod. Thereupon he made a bargain with the blacksmith, and the blacksmith set to work to put horseshoes on the devil. Now the honest blacksmith knew very well that it was the devil and nobody else. So he put on each of his feet a red-hot shoe, and drove the nails straight into the devil’s hoofs. The devil then paid him and went his way; but the honest blacksmith threw the money into the fire. Meanwhile, the devil, after walking some time, began to suffer pain from his shoes, and as he went on the pain became worse and worse. In his torment he danced and he kicked and he raged and he swore, and still the pain became worse. Then at last, in agony, he tore the shoes off and threw them away. From that day to this whenever the devil sees a horseshoe he runs away as fast as he can go. The superstition of the horseshoe has been so eagerly embraced by the Negro that most people seem to think that it originated with him. It is precisely like many of his own superstitions, and it shows that ignorance and superstition in Africa are like ignorance and superstition anywhere else, and that the African mind is essentially like our own.