How eagerly we welcomed the mail! It arrived once a month, and was six weeks old. Even Dr. Good, indefatigable worker, and the opposite of emotional, was unable to pursue the usual routine of work when we were expecting the carriers with mail. They usually came in the evening, and all that day we were under a noticeable strain of expectancy. We were also exceedingly talkative and communicative for a day or two after its arrival. Years afterwards I once visited one of our missionaries, Miss Christensen, when for some months she had been staying alone at Benito, one of our old coast stations. I remarked that the arrival of her mail must be a great relief to the extreme loneliness of her situation. She replied that, on the contrary, the mail day was the loneliest of all, for want of some appreciative friend to whom she could tell the news contained in her letters and talk about it. There were educated natives around her whose friendship was almost sufficient for other days, but not for mail day. Her home interests were unintelligible to them. My first letters from Efulen were written on an immense log that lay near the tent. I stood and leaned over upon it as I wrote. When I finished my first letter I found that I had been leaning against a stream of pitch all the while, with the sleeve of a woollen sweater lying in it. But the difficulties of letter-writing were not merely physical. Each correspondent in the homeland naturally expected me to tell him all about the natives and our life in Africa. To describe adequately any one phase of our life would require a length of letter that would have made my correspondence unmanageable, and to refer to our strange surroundings without adequate description would have left my letters unintelligible. I thought to meet the difficulty by dividing my friends into groups, asking friends of a feather to flock together, and writing occasionally a long and elaborate letter to each flock. I have never succeeded in killing two birds with one stone, but I killed a number of valued correspondents with each of those letters. No one replied to them but the person to whom the envelope was directed.