e fled; yet Billy won him with infinite patience, and in the
event they became the closest of friends. Withal he possessed a pair of
the most powerful shoulders I have ever seen on a man of his frame; and
in the depths of his mild blue eyes flickered a flame of resolution that
I could well imagine flaring up to something formidable. Slow to make
friends, but staunch and loyal; gentle and forbearing, but fierce and
implacable in action; at once loved and most terribly feared; shy as a
wild animal, but straightforward and undeviating in his human relations;
most remarkably quiet and unassuming, but with tremendous vital force in
his deep eyes and forward-thrust jaw; informed with the widest and most
understanding humanity, but unforgiving of evildoers; and with the most
direct and absolute courage, Bwana C. was to me the most interesting man
I met in Africa, and became the best of my friends.

The only other man at our table happened to be, for our sins, the young
Englishman mentioned as throwing the first coin to the old woman on the
pier at Marseilles. We will call him Brown, and, because he represents a
type, he is worth looking upon for a moment.

He was of the super-enthusiastic sort; bubbling over with vitality, in
and out of everything; bounding up at odd and languid moments. To an
extraordinary extent he was afflicted with the spiritual blindness of
his class. Quite genuinely, quite seriously, he was unconscious of the
human significance of beings and institutions belonging to a foreign
country or even to a class other than his own. His own kind he treated
as complete and understandable human creatures. All others were merely
objective. As we, to a certain extent, happened to fall in the former
category, he was as pleasant to us as possible--that is, he was pleasant
to us in his way, but had not insight enough to guess at how to be
pleasant to us in our way. But as soon as he got out of his own class,
or what he conceived to be such, he considered all people as
"outsiders." He did not credit them with prejudices to rub, with
feelings to hurt, indeed hardly with ears to overhear. Provided his
subject was an "outsider," he had not the slightest hesitancy in saying
exactly what he thought about any one, anywhere, always in his high
clear English voice, no matter what the time or occasion. As a natural
corollary he always rebuffed beggars and the like brutally, and was
always quite sublimely doing little things that t