Now, if I were relating fiction and not reality, I should certainly proceed to have Keli properly flogged and the mind of the community deeply impressed in consequence. But as reality never quite attains the ideal, and as I may not substitute imagination for history in this sober narrative, I must tell of “the slip twixt the cup and the lip.” Prominent among Keli’s moral discrepancies was cowardice; and even before the rod descended for the first time he uttered a scream that evidently startled Dr. Good, for he let go his hold and Keli bounded from him. Dr. Good chased him and could easily have caught him but it had been raining and the clay surface of the street was smooth and slippery, giving Keli’s bare feet a decided advantage. They both resembled amateur performers on roller skates. The chase that followed seemed to appeal peculiarly to the humour of the natives, which was the more excessive because of the strong reaction from fear and apprehension. They laughed wildly. Keli led the way around the palaver-house once or twice, then down the street, Dr. Good following him close and reaching after him, while he administered what would have been a severe flogging but that the strokes persistently fell about twelve inches behind Keli’s shoulders, affording him, I imagine, an acute realization of the old adage, “A miss is as good as a mile.” Soon they reached a steep slope in the street, and Keli, steadily gaining, at last made his escape. I, looking on, maintained an exterior of stern gravity that was the very antithesis of my feeling. But deeper than outward gravity and inward laughter I was praying that nothing might happen to impede Keli’s steady progress; for this flogging in pantomime served to impress a moral lesson, while it left no marks on poor Keli’s skin, whom seven tribes and nations had helped to degrade. I should not wonder if Dr. Good himself felt somewhat as I did. On our way home Dr. Good intimated to me the moral propriety of not mentioning the incident to Mr. Kerr or any of the missionaries at the coast, for I was soon going to the coast. “Indeed,” said I, “you could not possibly bribe me to silence regarding the episode of this morning. It would be a great wrong, in this weary land, to deprive my fellow missionaries of such an entertainment, and I am really thinking of going to the coast a day earlier than I had expected.” No man could yield to the inevitable with better grace than Dr. Good. Before we reached home he was laughing; and he was even disposed to anticipate me in telling the story, which he did with dramatic effects and graphic touches inimitable.