Africa is not a great solitude in which one of an ascetic temper might enjoy silence and meditation. There is no quiet except during the night and no solitude but the solitude of a strange city where one passes through a multitude unrecognized and unknown. For these Africans will probably never know us. Nor had we three white men any privacy in our relations with each other, either in our tent or in the house that displaced it; and for my own part, this was the most trying of all our privations. Under the circumstances I think we three men deserved great credit for not hating each other. But after supper, when it was dark I used to go out to a little walk about ten yards long in front of the house and removed a short distance from it, the only smooth walk on the entire hill, and there I enjoyed a few minutes of delightful respite from noise and publicity, while my thoughts of home and friends were unrestrained. The life in the homeland seemed already painfully distant, and almost vague and unreal. Like Silas Marner, when he removed from his old home to Raveloe where he was surrounded by people who knew nothing of his history, so to me sometimes the past seemed like a dream because related to nothing in my present life, and the present, too, a dream, because linked with no memories of the past. Even at night the noise does not cease, but only removes to a distance where it no longer disturbs. The people stay in their towns at night, but they usually make more noise than in the day. From a village at the foot of the hill rises the weird and incessant wail of their mourning for the dead, an appalling dirge that chills the blood; from another village near by, a savage noise of war drums and shouting by which they are warning an expected enemy that they are on the watch; from another, the uncouth music of their dissolute dance; from another the cries of men who profess to be transformed into gorillas or leopards:—on all sides the noise ascending throughout the night like the smoke of their torment.