mud hut to another along the rivers and lakes, and all the possessions
that he had in the world could be put into the bottom of his canoe.

But our Heavenly Father, Who loves you and me, went with him every
step of the way. When Shomolekae taught the boys and girls to sing
hymns in praise of Jesus, even in a little mud hut, He was there, just
as He is in the most beautiful church when we worship Him. Now God has
taken Shomolekae across the last river to be with Himself.

Shomolekae was a negro with dark skin and curly hair. We are white
children with fair faces and light hair. But God is his Father as well
as ours and loves us all alike and wishes to gather us together round
Him--loving Him and one another.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 56: Pronounce Shoh-moh-leh-kei.]

CHAPTER XXII

THE WOMAN WHO CONQUERED CANNIBALS

_Mary Slessor_

(Dates, b. 1848, d. 1915)

I. THE MILL-GIRL

_The Calabar Girls at the Station_

As the train from the south slowed down in Waverley Station,
Edinburgh, one day in 1898, a black face, with eyes wide open with
wonder, appeared at the window. The carriage door opened and a little
African girl was handed down onto the platform.

The people on the station stopped to glance at the strange negro face.
But as a second African girl a little older than the first stepped
from the carriage to the platform, and a third, and then a fourth
black girl appeared, the cabmen and porters stood staring in amused
curiosity.

Who was that strange woman (they asked one another), short and slight,
with a face like yellow parchment and with short, straight brown hair,
who smiled as she gathered the little tribe of African girls round her
on the railway platform?

The telegraph boys and the news-boys gazed at her in astonishment.
But they would have been transfixed with amazement if they had known
a tenth of the wonder of the story of that heroic woman who, just
as simply as she stood there on the Waverley platform, had mastered
cannibals, conquered wild drunken chiefs brandishing loaded muskets,
had faced hunger and thirst under the flaming heat and burning fevers
of Africa, and walked unscathed by night through forests haunted by
ferocious leopards, to triumph over regiments of frenzied savages
drawn up for battle, had rescued from death hundreds of baby twins
thrown out to be eaten by ants--and had now brought home to Scotland
from West Africa four of these her rescued children.

Still more