However it may be, we who have lived long among the Africans, and without the distemper of racial prejudice, do invariably find that our ideas, or our standards, gradually undergo such a change that the African face appears to us in varying degrees of beauty, much as that of the white; beauty which at first we did not see. Even the nose, which bears a striking resemblance to the ace of clubs, at length, with custom, ceases to appear ugly, and seems the absolutely proper nose for the African physiognomy. And they surely have beautiful eyes. Yet one must admit that it is not eyes, nor noses, nor even faces, but legs, that are most in evidence in African society. I suppose it is because we are not used to seeing those honourable and useful members exposed that they are so conspicuous. Looking at an African crowd, especially when seated on the ground as in a village service or listening to a native “palaver,” with their knees elevated in front of them, there seems to be ten times as many legs as people. Their variety also commands attention. There are long legs and short legs, lean legs and fat legs, straight legs and crooked legs, gnarled legs, knotted legs, brown legs and black legs. Probably nowhere in the world is life more primitive. How little a man can live on! How much he can do without! An African can be happy with a pot, a pipe and a tom-tom. I have shown some of them a wheel for the first time, making use of a toy, and have explained its use while they wondered. At Vivi, on the Congo, they tell that when they began to build the railroad they unloaded a shipment of wheelbarrows and ordered the workmen to use them in removing the débris. A little later they observed the workmen marching in single file with the loaded wheelbarrows on their heads. They have only the vaguest idea of passing time. They never know their own ages, of course; neither can they understand why anybody should want to know. A man of middle age makes a serious guess that he is ten years old. A French judge in Senegal tells how that a man, brought before him, gave his age as five years—when he had been weaned at least twenty-five. The Fang when they first come from the interior go almost entirely naked. The men wear a bit of bark-cloth, the women a few leaves, children to the age of nine or ten years wear nothing. But as soon as they come in contact with coast people they all begin to wear imported cloth. A chief soon attains the dignity of a shirt. If they have little use for clothes they are passionately fond of ornamentation. When they first come from the interior they are fairly loaded with beads and brass, the latter made into heavy arm-rings, leg-rings, neck-rings and coiled bracelets which cover the entire forearm. At first they regard clothes also as ornamentation and they think that white people, in comparison with them, are exceedingly vain.