While I was in Africa a second time and living in Gaboon, two hundred miles further south on the coast, I visited Efulen once more. The road was much more improved than when I had seen it last. The sun shone through the arcade of vines and branches and formed upon the pathway a filigree of gold and silver light. The mode of travel was different accordingly. It was the best time of the year and there was a happy party of eleven, so that the journey was like a continuous picnic. Four of the party were ladies, three of whom were carried in hammocks and one rode a donkey. Besides, and chiefly, there was a very sweet little girl, two years old—a little splash of golden sunshine in the gray forest light, a dream of home, a fragment of a song⸺ Ah me! how lonely one becomes for the sight of a white child when he has lived some years in the jungles! Much of the time the ladies were walking and the hammocks empty. The hammock is suspended from a long bamboo pole borne upon the shoulders of two carriers. But the carriers must be relieved frequently, for it is dreadfully hard work. Six of the strongest native men are required for one hammock. Little Lois also had her special hammock, with a firm floor in it, so that she could sit upright, and she was perfectly happy when riding through the forest. [Illustration: LITTLE FRANCES, BORN IN AFRICA. _Ah me, how lonely one becomes for the sight of a white child when he has lived some years in the jungles!_] Several towns had been built along the way and in one of them we stopped each night, where we occupied native houses and slept on native beds of straight bamboo poles covered with armfuls of grass—as good a bed as one could desire. The numerous ticks in the grass were converted into bed-ticks—such was our resourcefulness of expedient. The only dislikable part of the journey was rising so early in the morning when we could have slept on for hours, after the walk of the preceding day. But an incident of that journey impressed it distinctly upon my mind that there is some advantage in eating breakfast before daylight. One morning we had an oatmeal breakfast. The day dawned upon two tardy boarders before they had eaten and they were horrified at discovering that the oatmeal was full of vermiform animalcules. Of course, they could not eat it and had the poorer breakfast in consequence, and the other nine thought that it served them quite right for being so late. A doubt has always lurked in the recesses of my mind as to whether the joke was really on the two or on the nine.