It is part of the squalid commonplace of life in Africa that the most exciting adventures are not with elephants but with ants, and our worst danger is not the leopard but the mosquito. And this struggle against minute enemies requires more patience than the fight with beasts, both because it is not occasional, but an unremitting warfare, and because it does not appeal to our love of the heroic, nor stimulate with the promise of praise. When Paul tells us that he fought with beasts at Ephesus, our hearts swell with admiration; but if he had said: “I have fought with the mosquitoes in Africa,” he would have elicited no sympathy and some ridicule; although the latter is also a fight for life, and attended by greater danger and weariness and pain. It is significant that it was in Africa that Moses summoned the ten plagues to his aid in humbling the haughty Pharaoh. If ten had not been sufficient he might have summoned ten times ten, and without exhausting the domestic resources. We are grateful that common houseflies are not sufficiently numerous to constitute a pest, except where cattle are bred in large numbers. In Gaboon there was no need for screens on doors and windows. But there are many kinds of flies, and the natives who have not learned to wear clothing commonly carry a fly-brush made of a bunch of stiff grass about two feet long, that they may defend the whole area of the back, where the fly usually makes its attack. When one sees a fly on a neighbour’s back it is regarded as a duty of friendship to come up behind that neighbour slowly and stealthily, giving the fly full time to bite his worst and so be deserving of death, then to strike an awful blow on the neighbour’s back, fit to bring him to his feet with a yell. It seldom harms the fly, but it expresses great indignation, and, by implication, sympathy with your neighbour. The habit of killing flies, or attempting to kill them when they alight, is an obsession with the native, and it seems a physical impossibility for him to resist. He does it in church. When I first preached in Batanga, to a large congregation, I was very much disturbed by this unlooked-for and constant slapping on bare backs. And whenever I saw a man creep quietly across the aisle or forward several seats to perform this friendly office, I could not help watching until I heard the slap, when I always felt like stopping the discourse long enough to ask: “Did you kill it?” For in the mind of all those around there seemed to be nothing else going on in that church but this exhibition of applied Christianity.