'up countries'--his Heaven and Hell, and both are of his own making.
The latter is the one of which he speaks to his fellow race-mates--if he
speaks at all about his solitary life. The former lies at the back of
his heart, and is only known to himself, and then but dimly known till
the time comes for a return to the Tents of Shem. Englishmen, above all
other men, revel in their privilege of being allowed to grumble and
'grouse' over the lives which the Fates have allotted to them. They
speak briefly, roughly, and gruffly of the hardships they endure, making
but little of them perhaps, and talking as though their lives, as a
matter of course, were made up of these things only. The instinct of the
race is to see life through the national pea-soup fog, which makes all
things dingy, unlovely, and ugly. Nothing is more difficult than to
induce men of our race to confess that in their lives--hard though they
may have been--good things have not held aloof, and that they have often
been quite happy under the most unlikely circumstances, and in spite of
the many horrors and privations which have long encompassed them about.

Let us take the Hell first. We often have to do so, making a virtue of
necessity, and a habit is a habit; moreover, our pains are always more
interesting than our pleasures--to our neighbours. Therefore, let us
take the dark view of up-country life to start upon. In the beginning,
when first a man turns from his own people, and dwells in isolation
among an alien race, he suffers many things. The solitude of soul--that
terrible solitude which is only to be experienced in a crowd--the dead
monotony, without hope of change; the severance from all the pleasant
things of life, and the want of any substitutes for them, eat into the
heart and brain of him as a corrosive acid eats into iron. He longs for
the fellowship of his own people with an exceeding great longing, till
it becomes a burden too grievous to bear; he yearns to find comradeship
among the people of the land, but he knows not yet the manner by which
their confidence may be won, and they, on their side, know him for a
stranger within their gates, view him with keen suspicion, and hold him
at arm's length. His ideas, his prejudices, his modes of thought, his
views on every conceivable subject differ too widely from their own, for
immediate sympathy to be possible between him and them. His habits are
the habits of a white man, and many little things, to w