He attended the school at Angom which was well kept and well taught under Mr. Marling’s administration; and at an age when most children do not know their letters he could read. I, who did not know him until the beginning of this present year, have regarded him as an intellectual prodigy. His knowledge of the Scripture and his understanding of it was astonishing in one so young. The whole Gospel of Matthew, the only one which has been translated into the Fang, he knew almost by heart, besides a considerable acquaintance with the other Scriptures through the Mpongwe translations; for he knew Mpongwe almost as well as Fang. He was baptized and received into the church at a younger age perhaps than any other child has ever been received in our mission; and through the years that have since passed, amidst degrading surroundings of which you in the homeland can scarcely conceive, this little boy kept the faith which he then professed, and grew up pure, truthful, unselfish and affectionate. Mr. Marling died in the fall of 1896, Ndong Mba being then, probably, seven or eight years old. Long before this, however, the people of his town had moved far away, leaving him behind, and were quite lost sight of. He was now without friends, white or black, at the age of eight. In a distant bush-town there was a woman who had formerly lived in Ndong’s town: he made his way to her and begged her to take him in. There, in a town remote from missionary influence, in which there was not one person related to him, the poor little stranger lived for three years, during which no missionary either saw him or heard of him. His position in the town was not much better than that of everybody’s slave. His frailty, instead of insuring greater kindness, only made him contemptible. Whenever he spoke of those three years it was always of his sufferings there, and his back was injured by the heavy loads that had been put upon him. He was the only Christian in the town; but there is no doubt that through those hard and lonely years the little Christian was constant and faithful in profession and practice;—as strange, upon its human side, as that a lighted candle should withstand a winter’s storm. At the end of this time a long-wished-for opportunity came; he joined a company of travellers and again reached Angom, hoping to find a missionary there. There was no missionary there at the time and he found the station closed; but, in a town close by, a woman was visiting who years before had lived in Ndong’s town. She was probably a Christian woman, for she was compassionate. Her heart was touched and she took him with her to her home near the coast. It was only a few weeks after this that I met him, at the beginning of this year.