"Not a cent! I've merely found another job." "You're pulling my leg!" I detected a distinct note of envy in the exclamation. Even the industrious Swanson felt that he would have been better off in the business world than in the Civil Service. "I'm an explorer!" I said. "If you're good, I shall send you some tusks and things when I get to Gaboon." "You don't mean to say that you actually are going to Africa?" "All the way--and then some!" At this point the exchange butted in with the simple explanation that my time limit was up. "Bye-bye!" I said. "I'll drop you a line. . . ." I hung up the receiver, emerged from my box, and hurried out into the sunlight again. So that was _that_! When I was in my right mind again I would write to my Lords the Commissioners, and confirm my telephone message, but in my present mood I should have found it impossible to sit down and subscribe myself as their obedient servant, George Barnett. It was so palpably untrue. I was nobody's servant this morning--nobody's! Back in the town again the whim seized me to go into the Public Library and glean a few interesting tit-bits about the gentle gorilla and its playful ways. So I consulted the librarian, borrowed Du Chaillu's "Equatorial Africa," and sat down and commenced reading. It was an absorbing book; and on that bright, adventurous morning it gripped me more fiercely than the finest love story ever written. Parts of it made me shiver, and yet they fascinated. The description of one disastrous encounter with a gorilla ran as follows:-- "We picked him (a native) up and I dressed his wounds as well as I could with rags torn from my clothes. When I had given him a little brandy he came to himself and was able, but with great difficulty, to speak. He said that he had met the gorilla suddenly and face to face, and that it had not attempted to escape. It was, he said, a huge male, and seemed very savage. It was in a very gloomy part of the wood, and the darkness, I suppose, made him miss. He said he took good aim, and fired when the beast was only about eight yards off. The ball merely wounded it in the side. It at once began beating its breasts, and with the greatest rage advanced upon him. "To run away was impossible. He would have been caught in the jungle before he had gone a dozen steps.