I well know the manners of native boys who have been in the mission long enough to become teachers. They have an instinct for good manners. It would be far easier to criticize their morals than their manners. At this same place Miss Kingsley sent an attendant to ask the teacher for wood to make a fire. The attendant returned and said that the teacher would not give him wood unless it was paid for. Knowing the cordial hospitality and eager attention that would be given to a white woman by any and every mission teacher that I have met in Africa, I am compelled, from the extraordinary behaviour of this teacher, to doubt whether Miss Kingsley was a gracious guest. But we need not remain in doubt; for Miss Kingsley, while she was the guest of this teacher, in a mission house, had with her a demijohn of rum, which she dispensed to the natives in pay and barter, as was her custom everywhere; and it is more than possible that the teacher’s message that his wood was for sale was a moral protest, not only against the violation of hospitality, but also against the violation of those moral and religious principles to which his life and honour were committed, and upon which depended, as he sincerely believed, the salvation of his people. It would be my duty to show that Miss Kingsley received most of her so-called facts directly from the traders, and that all that came under her own observation she saw through the medium of their opinions. But Miss Kingsley has forestalled the necessity by the following frank confession: “All I know that is true regarding West Africa, I owe to the traders.”[13] Miss Kingsley must have felt that she owed an enormous debt of gratitude to the traders: for through two large volumes she sings a continual pæan to the trader’s praise. I might by the citation of facts within my own knowledge show that in some instances Miss Kingsley was mistaken; but I have not the least disposition to do so. For the life of the trader on the far-away beaches of West Africa is so cheerless and loveless—sometimes, indeed, an unremitting and lonely fight with temptation, fever, delirium and death—that sympathy is more becoming than criticism. Footnote 13: _Travels in West Africa_, p. 7.