In the little graveyard, on the mission hill at Baraka, are the graves of those who have thought that life itself was not too great a price to pay for the saving of such men and women from degradation. Henry Drummond said that while in Africa he had been in an atmosphere of death all the time, and that he realized, as never before, the awful fact of death and its desolation as something calling for an answer. One of my first experiences in Gaboon reminded me that I was again in the land of death, when I assisted in the burial service of the beautiful young wife and bride of a fellow missionary, less than three months after their arrival in Africa. So far away from home we enter deeply into each other’s sorrows. I was standing by in the last hour, when with pale face the stricken but silent husband stepped to the open door and nervously plucked a flower growing there, a large crimson hibiscus, the beauty of the tropics, which he laid on the pillow beside his unconscious wife, and the two broken flowers drooped and died together, while the shadows darkened around us and the night came on. In the unconscious act there was something more affecting than in any words of grief. It seemed to relate this death to all death everywhere, in a world where forms of life appear only to vanish into darkness and day hurries to the night. Soon after our patient sufferer had ceased to breathe, in the midst of the stillness that followed the prolonged struggle with the fever, a storm that had been gathering with the darkness broke forth with great violence that shook the house. I had only arrived in Africa. I went out into the storm unspeakably oppressed with doubt, to which it was a kind of relief. Was it a noble sacrifice? or an appalling waste? In the intervals of the storm, and mingling with it, there came the sound of a dirge, the hopeless death-wail, from a village close by, where the poor natives were mourning for one of their number who had died that day, a young man at whose bed I had stood a few hours earlier, the only son of a heart-broken mother. Those who have always known the words of One who brought life and immortality to light cannot realize the heathen view of death, and the abysmal darkness of the invisible world. There is no sound so well known in Africa, and none that so haunts the memory in after years, as the mourning dirge, in which with united voices they chant their sorrow for the dead—their despair and desolation; the sound that is borne upon every night-wind and becomes to the imagination the very voice of Africa. The groaning of the palm-trees in the darkness of that night, as they bent beneath the tempest, and in the distance the sound of the troubled sea, were the fitting accompaniment and interlude. But in our house, beside our dead, there was light—and doubt was vanquished. There, hope was whispering to a stricken heart sweet promises of life; and faith was saying: “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”