he son, was to have gone up to
Oxford. The lad was therefore compelled to start life in a stony world
with a stock in trade which consisted of a school boy's command of the
classics, a real inborn gift of tongues and the friendship of James
Walker. The last item proved of the most immediate value. For Walker,
whose father was the junior partner in a firm of West African
merchants, obtained for Hatteras an employment as the bookkeeper at a
branch factory in the Bight of Benin.

Thus the friends parted. Hatteras went out to West Africa alone and
met with a strange welcome on the day when he landed. The incident
did not come to Walker's ears until some time afterwards, nor when he
heard of it did he at once appreciate the effect which it had upon
Hatteras. But chronologically it comes into the story at this point,
and so may as well be immediately told.

There was no settlement very near to the factory. It stood by itself
on the swamps of the Forcados river with the mangrove forest closing
in about it. Accordingly the captain of the steamer just put
Hatteras ashore in a boat and left him with his traps on the beach.
Half-a-dozen Kru boys had come down from the factory to receive him,
but they could speak no English, and Hatteras at this time could speak
no Kru. So that although there was no lack of conversation there was
not much interchange of thought. At last Hatteras pointed to his
traps. The Kru boys picked them up and preceded Hatteras to the
factory. They mounted the steps to the verandah on the first floor and
laid their loads down. Then they proceeded to further conversation.
Hatteras gathered from their excited faces and gestures that they
wished to impart information, but he could make neither head nor tail
of a word they said and at last he retired from the din of their
chatter through the windows of a room which gave on the verandah, and
sat down to wait for his superior, the agent. It was early in the
morning when Hatteras landed and he waited until midday patiently. In
the afternoon it occurred to him that the agent would have shown
a kindly consideration if he had left a written message or an
intelligible Kru boy to receive him. It is true that the blacks came
in at intervals and chattered and gesticulated, but matters were not
thereby appreciably improved. He did not like to go poking about the
house, so he contemplated the mud-banks and the mud-river and the
mangrove forest, and cursed the agent. The cou