I myself, after several years of frequent fever, at last gained practical immunity by taking five grains of quinine every night, which I did without omission for three years, until I left the coast. If my vitality had not been already reduced to the minimum I would not have required so much quinine. Many persons, instead of taking quinine regularly, wait until the fever actually comes and then take very large, nerve-shattering doses for successive days, from thirty to sixty or even ninety grains a day. One may recover from the fever, but one does not entirely recover from the quinine until he leaves the coast. Sometimes the newcomer is fairly frightened into a fever by those who have lived in Africa long enough to have become obsessed with the thought of the climate and whose conversation it completely absorbs. Near the end of my voyage to Africa I spent a night ashore at a certain mission, where a good lady who was in a very sociable mood, having shown me to my room, stood in the doorway telling me of the various persons—not a few—who had died in that particular room, and giving some graphic detail of each death. It was gradually borne in upon me that there must be some horrible fatality attached to that room. Finally she advised me not to lock my door. “For,” said she, “Mr. P——, who always locked his bedroom door, was found dead in bed one morning in this very room, although he went to bed looking as well as you do now. About noon next day they broke the door open, and sure enough there he was—lying right there!” I replied: “My dear lady, won’t you please knock on my door very early in the morning, and if I do not answer, open the door and walk in; for I fully expect to be dead.” A certain American lady, who was a missionary for some years in Liberia, tells how that when she landed, expecting to proceed to a station some distance inland, where she would join several other missionaries, she was met with the news that the missionaries of that station (four, I believe) had all died of fever a few days before she landed, one immediately after another. Nevertheless, the person who had the authority for her appointment escorted her to that desolate station and left her there alone. A partition of boards in the house was nearly all gone; it was only a few feet from the floor. She asked the explanation of this appearance and was told that the boards had been used to make coffins. Having received this interesting, though somewhat curious information, she was left alone to find what comfort she could in the reflection that there was enough of the partition left for one more coffin. She told me about it herself—many years afterwards. II THE WISE ONES