"To blazes with the Civil Service. . . ." I thought. "Why should I moulder in an office when there are so many more interesting places in the world?" I found a map of Africa and discovered Gaboon and its principal port of Libreville. It might have looked an outlandish spot, but at any rate it looked exciting. I liked the shape of the river mouth; the country to the east; the proximity of the Equator, which ran only a few miles to the south; and the way the great blue sea spread out to the west. I found Walfisch Bay and the Kalahari. And then I looked at the tiny patch of dirt which we call England. I thought of the tedious train journey from north to south of this island, and I measured the distance on the same scale map of Africa. As I did so the immensity of our task suddenly smote me in all its glory. It was uncanny to think that all those thousands of miles away lay the great African jungles; that at this precise moment, while I was peacefully smoking my pipe in Richmond, there was another land in which the gorilla and the chimpanzee roamed and fought and died; and that presently we should commence invading their fastnesses and enlisting their services in aid of the aged and decrepit of our own race. I tried to picture the place--the tall trees, the ghostly undergrowth, the sodden marshes, the hot, dripping climate, the wicked and cunning little eyes which would watch us from the tree tops and the bushes as we went on our errand of mercy. I tried to visualize native villages and long, meandering rivers infested with crocodiles and hippopotami. I feebly attempted to imagine what a herd of wild elephants looked like. Did the porcupine erect its quills when angry and the lion slink away at the sight and smell of you? What were the prevalent diseases in this new land of hope and glory? Would the natives welcome us, or pursue and torture and devour us? How much cheap jewelry and beads should we require to bribe them to help us? Did they bother about such things now, or had they moved with the times and installed picture palaces and gramophones in their chief villages? Even when I retired to bed that night I still went on speculating. My poor, civilized brain was troubled with vague, terrorizing dreams, manufactured no doubt from all I had ever read and heard of the grotesque, the hideous and the cruel. I was pursued by cannibals, bitten by mosquitoes, mauled by tigers, nibbled by swarms of ants, and trampled on by wild elephants. But I never saw a single gorilla! Monkeys I saw galore--little black-faced chattering creatures, hanging by their tails from branches high overhead; also a horrid dog-faced baboon pursuing Gran'pa (bearded and old and withered again!) down a narrow pathway which led to the sea. But not a single gorilla! It was very astonishing. Was it an omen, I wondered?