but the missionary spoke. "It has become my home, and its
people my people," he said.

I turned the saying over in my mind before I spoke again. Then interest
and attraction overcame my hesitation, and I abandoned all pretence
of making a chance conversation. "Father," I said, "I expect you have
travelled a good deal up there and seen many things. Tell me a
little about it all. I've seen enough to be very interested in your
experiences. May I pull up a chair and may we talk?"

His brown eyes twinkled, "Certainly," he said, "especially if you will
give me a fill of that English tobacco you're smoking. Years ago I
learned to smoke English tobacco, but it hasn't too often come my way."

I threw him my pouch with a laugh and went to find a chair. That was the
beginning of many conversations, but none of his stories interested me
more than the one he told me that night. He had half hinted of strange
happenings away back there in remote districts, as well as of more
commonplace although sufficiently interesting journeys and adventures,
and it was to the less usual that I was drawn that evening. There was
that about Pere Etienne which made one feel that the commonplace world
was of secondary importance, and that he, like the poet at Charing
Cross, might find Jacob's ladder reaching heavenward in any place. Thus,
while the light died swiftly out of the sky and the stars shone out
over that far-off range which runs up to the Para Mountains and giant
Kilimanjaro and that far-flung plain which lies embraced beyond, between
them and the great lakes, I put my question and he answered it. "Tell me
the queerest of all the queer things you have seen, father," I said.

"Queer?"

"Yes," said I. "Unusual, I mean. Not necessarily supernatural, and not
horrible. But the thing, perhaps, that more than all else draws your
mind back to Africa."

"You ask a big thing," he said, smiling friendlily.

"And I believe you can answer it," said I, impulsively.

He nodded more gravely. "I believe I can," he said.

"I shall tell you a little story that seems to me singularly arresting
and tender. True, I believe that it may arrest me because it occurred
in a village--or perhaps I should say a town--which I have visited
but once though I have often tried to get back to it again. Now I shall
never go. Very likely it is for that reason, then, that it lingers in my
memory as a place of great beauty, though in my opinion there are other
causes. How