This story Miss Kingsley tells, in substance, though in abridged form, and with no comment except the following apology for the Portuguese: “My Portuguese friends assure me that there never was a thought of permanently detaining the boys, and that they were only just keeping them until other labourers arrived to take their place on the plantation. I quite believe them, for I have seen too much of the Portuguese in Africa to believe that they would in a wholesale way be cruel to natives.”[10] Surely the quality of Miss Kingsley’s charity is not strained! I scarcely know a white man in West Africa who would offer any apology for those men, or who would call them his “friends.” If the poor Krumen had been captured, Miss Kingsley’s friends would probably have flogged them to death. As a matter of fact, there are always a number of escaped slaves leading a wretched existence in the deep forest of San Thomé. And the Portuguese have been known to go hunting them as we would hunt wild animals. They sometimes find them hiding in the tops of the tall trees, and it is considered uncommonly fine sport to shoot them in the trees and bring them crashing to the ground. Footnote 10: _Travels in West Africa_, p. 49. Miss Kingsley disliked any and every change that threatened to improve the native and thus to mar the picturesque wildness of his savage state. She is perfectly consistent with her anti-mission views when she tells us the kind of native that she admires, as follows: “A great, strong Kruman, for example, with his front teeth filed, nothing much on but oil, half a dozen wives, and half a hundred jujus [fetishes], is a sort of person whom I hold higher than any other form of native.”[11] Well, it is proverbial that tastes differ; but the missionary thinks that, as compared with this, the Christian ideal is higher and nobler. Miss Kingsley informs us (through the words of another whom she quotes with approval) of the treatment received, at the hands of these same Krumen, by shipwrecked and half-drowned passengers cast helpless upon the shore: “If you get ashore you don’t save the things you stand up in—the natives strip you.” “Of course they are cannibals; they are all cannibals when they get a chance.”[12] And this is the sort of person whom Miss Kingsley holds “higher than any other form of native”! Footnote 11: _West African Studies_, p. 385. Footnote 12: _Ibid._, p. 42. [Illustration: A CONTRAST. Anyoroguli, a Christian woman of Gaboon. ] [Illustration: WOMEN OF THE INTERIOR RETURNING FROM THE GARDENS WITH CASSAVA AND FIREWOOD. ]