“There was once a wayward and wilful son who lived alone with his mother. One day coming home hungry he ordered her to gather some greens and cook them for him. The mother, who never resisted his wishes, went out and gathered plenty of greens and cooked them. But in the cooking they shrivelled up as greens always do. Then the mother presented the greens to her son; but the son looking at them accused his mother of having eaten the greens herself. This she denied; but the son would not believe her, and in his anger he struck her a blow on the head, and the mother fell dead at his feet. Then he cried out in anguish and sorrow; long and bitterly did he cry, but in vain. She was dead! She was dead! He had killed his own mother. From that day, all the days he mourned, saying always: ‘I killed my mother; I killed my mother;’ and all the nights he sobbed and moaned: ‘I killed my mother.’ “Then the spirits seeing his sorrow, that it was very great, and hearing him cry always day and night, at last were moved with pity, and turned him into a snail, which cannot suffer like a man. But though the snail does not weep in the daytime, yet at night it mourns and cries: ‘I—killed—my—mother;’ and so it will keep on crying until the end of the world.” The reader will of course understand that the note of the snail is single and bears no resemblance to these articulate words of the son’s sorrow. The interpretation is purely spiritual, and poetic genius could scarcely improve upon it as an expression of the unending remorse which the sound conveys to sensitive and susceptive minds. Sitting around the camp-fire they listen to the story as interested as if they had never heard it before, as children listen to the repetition of fables and nursery tales. Then remarks are made upon a son’s duty towards his mother, and some of them tell what good mothers they have; for this is the deepest reverence and highest sentiment of the African mind. “Whatever other estimate we may form of the African,” wrote Leighton Wilson, than whom no one has ever known the African better, “we may not doubt his love for his mother. Her name, whether she be dead or alive, is always on his lips and in his heart. She is the first being he thinks of when awakening from his slumbers and the last he remembers when closing his eyes in sleep; to her he confides secrets which he would reveal to no other human being on the face of the earth. He cares for no one else in time of sickness; she alone must prepare his food, administer his medicine, perform his ablutions and spread his mat for him. He flies to her in the hour of his distress, for he well knows if all the rest of the world turn against him she will be steadfast in her love, whether he be right or wrong.