I have said that they regarded our meagre stock of goods as fabulous wealth. They regarded us as we might regard a multi-millionaire. And, strange enough, we gradually fell into their way of thinking, and regarded their attitude as consonant with the facts. And why not? For, to be rich is to have a little more than your neighbours, and to be poor is to have less. There is no sense of privation in being compelled to do without those things which nobody else has; but however much we may have, we feel the pinch of poverty when there are additional comforts and enjoyments immediately around us which we cannot procure. Our privations were many and great, but they were for the most part inevitable. After the first few months we had the best procurable in our situation, and far more than those around us. So, every man in such a place will learn that wealth, after all, is a sentiment more than a condition, a feeling rather than a fact. But the return to civilization is like a sudden reversal of fortune, and in dire contrast a man experiences a very painful and oppressive sense of poverty when confronted with wealth so far beyond his own. We gave out various goods in pay to workmen engaged upon our premises. We bought food for the workmen and some for ourselves. The staple article of exchange was salt: one might almost call it the currency. There is so little of it that there is a chronic hunger for it. Children like it better than sugar. A teaspoonful of salt is the price of an egg. We also gave in exchange beads, shirt-buttons, brass rods, red-caps, knives, gun-flints, and later in the year we began to sell a little cloth. We bought bananas, plantains, cassava (that which Stanley calls “manioc,” which is their principal food) and building-material. All exchange is by barter, and it is a very tedious and trying process, a long palaver being regarded as almost essential to propriety even in the purchase of the smallest article. In trading among themselves the man who can talk longest and loudest usually gets the best of the bargain. The maintaining of a fixed price is new to the African and is hateful to him, even if the price be good, for it tends to deprive him of the palaver, which is the joy of his life. He makes the best of the fixed price however and even discovers that it still has some dramatic and histrionic possibilities. He lays down his bamboo, or his thatch, before me, telling me in a neighbourly manner how far he has had to go for it and how exceedingly scarce it is becoming, how unusually good this particular material is and what lavish offers he received for it along the way, and how friendship for the white man prevailed over baser considerations. For, what were he and his people before the white man came? But now, as for himself, he has left behind all his vices, and that very morning has decided to be a Christian.