ingstone, sailed to the West Coast of Africa to the
Kameruns.

His name was George Grenfell, a Cornish boy (born at Sancreed, four
miles from Penzance, in England), who was brought up in Birmingham.
He was apprenticed at fifteen to a firm of hardware and machinery
dealers. Here he picked up, as a lad, some knowledge of machinery that
helped him later on the Congo. He had been thrilled to meet at Bristol
College, where he was trained for his missionary work, a thin, worn,
heroic man of tried steel, Alfred Saker, the great Kamerun missionary,
and Grenfell leapt for joy to go out to the dangerous West Coast of
Africa, where he worked hard, teaching the Africans to make tables and
bricks and to print and read, healing them and preaching to them.

When Stanley came down the Congo to the sea and electrified the world
by the story of the great river, Grenfell and the Baptist Missionary
Society which he served conceived the daring and splendid plan of
starting a chain of mission stations right from the mouth of the
Congo eastward across Africa. In 1878 Grenfell was on his way up the
river--travelling along narrow paths flanked by grass often fifteen
feet high, and crossing swamps and rivers, till after thirteen
attempts and in eighteen months he reached Stanley Pool, February
1881. A thousand miles of river lay between Stanley Pool and Stanley
Falls, and even above Stanley Falls lay thirteen hundred miles of
navigable river. Canoes were perilous. Hippopotami upset them, and men
were dragged down and eaten by crocodiles. They must have a steamer
right up there beyond the Falls in the very heart of Africa.

Grenfell went home to England, and the steamer _Peace_ was built on
the Thames, Grenfell watching everything being made from the crank
to the funnel. She was built, launched, and tried on the Thames; then
taken to pieces and packed in 800 packages, weighing 65 lbs. each,
and taken to the mouth of the Congo. On the heads and shoulders of
a thousand men the whole ship and the food of the party were carried
past the rapids, over a thousand miles along narrow paths, in peril of
snakes and leopards and enemy savages, over streams crossed by bridges
of vine-creepers, through swamps, across ravines.

Grenfell's engineer, who was to have put the ship together, died. At
last they reached Stanley Pool. Grenfell with eight negroes started
to try to build the ship. It was a tremendous task. Grenfell said
the _Peace_ was "prayed togeth