To all the interior natives, Bulu and Fang, and even to the coast tribe of Batanga, my playing of that little organ was much the most wonderful thing about me. In going to Africa a second time, after four years’ absence, on my way to Gaboon I landed at Batanga for a few hours. The natives remembered me as having a beard, and I was now shaved. But there was with me a fellow traveller who had just such a beard as mine had been; so that, to the natives, he looked more like me than I did myself. They of course mistook him for me; and the stranger got a friendly reception which pleased him as much as it surprised him. He said he never had met such friendly natives. But upon my protest they discovered their mistake and began to pay me some attention. I insisted that they had forgotten me and that my feelings were hurt; at which they made the most excited remonstrance. They remembered that I had played the organ. One of the boys, in his eagerness to convince me that they had not forgotten me, began to imitate my motions at the organ, which he exaggerated to an outlandish caricature in which hands, feet, head, mouth and eyes were equally active, saying as he performed: “Look me, Mr. Milligan; this be you.” Following his example, they all engaged in a performance that would have scandalized any company of self-respecting monkeys, saying the while: “This be you, Mr. Milligan; this be you.” My fellow traveller, who may have felt somewhat chagrined at finding that the hearty reception accorded him was intended for me, turned to me and made some remarks that have no rightful place here. We are all familiar with the legend that Pythagoras invented the first musical instrument after listening to the blacksmith’s hammers. Longfellow repeats it in the poem, “To a Child”: “As great Pythagoras of yore, Standing beside the blacksmith’s door, And hearing the hammers, as they smote The anvils with a different note, Stole from the varying tones that hung Vibrant on every iron tongue The secret of the sounding wire, And formed the seven-corded lyre.” Shakespeare also refers to this reputed origin of music in “The Two Noble Kinsmen.” Pirithous, relating the death of Arcite, tells how he rode the pavement on a horse so black that the superstitious would have feared to buy him, a prancing steed whose iron-shod feet seemed only to touch the stones—as if counting them, rather than trampling them, and— “thus went counting The flinty pavement, dancing as ’twere to the music His own hoofs made—for, as they say, from iron Came music’s origin.”