_The walls are of split bamboo and the roof of palm thatch. The triangular openings serve both for ventilation and expectoration._] The first Sunday after my arrival in Africa I preached in the church at Batanga. I had carefully packed away every article of better clothing, including all starched linen, and all my shirts, and was wearing a suit which I had purchased at a trading-house for two dollars. I have reason to remember this from what Dr. Good said afterwards. He told me that when I landed from the steamer he surveyed me with eager curiosity, and that I had somehow impressed him with a doubt as to whether I would be able to adapt myself to our bush-life. But when he entered the Batanga Church the following Sunday and saw me standing in the pulpit divested of collar, cuffs and shirt, and dressed in a suit that everybody knew had cost exactly two dollars, doubt was banished, and to a fellow missionary he expressed his changed mind in the emphatic words: “He’ll do.” But surely in Africa and everywhere else our dress should be that which is proper to our work and our surroundings. The Batanga Church had a membership of four hundred, and the attendance was very large. The present edifice is a hideous and expensive structure of foreign material, altogether inappropriate to native conditions and a disfigurement in the landscape. But the old church of those days, while not sufficient in size, was admirable in other respects and picturesque—elevated on posts and with a board floor, bamboo walls, and roof of palm thatch. Along the base of the walls, at regular intervals, were large triangular openings for ventilation. But the people being accustomed to leave all matters of ventilation and sanitation to providence, evidently supposed that these openings were intended for their accommodation in expectorating. For the habit of expectoration is fixed and constant, and is as characteristic of Africa as noise. One does not object to it so much among bush people, who usually assemble outside, and in whose houses there are only ground floors. But when they begin to be civilized it is more noticeable and becomes offensive. The majority of the Batanga people, with the native instinct of good manners, were just sufficiently civilized to know that it is bad form to spit on the floor, but _not_ sufficiently civilized to break off the habit entirely. During the service they continually expectorated through the openings in the walls, and especially the women. It seemed that the more interested they became in the sermon the more fluently they expectorated. My attention was arrested and almost diverted by the uncertainty and suspense whenever I saw an old woman on the inside end of a pew, lean forward, twist her head to one side, take deliberate aim, and fire past six persons. She never missed the hole—unless some one of those between her and the wall should happen to move or lean forward just at the wrong moment, which of course was not her fault.