a complete meal from that.  When he had quite finished eating all he could, he drank all he could; then he departed from the table, and took up a remote and inaccessible position in the corner of the smoking-room.  He was engaged in growing the beard he customarily wore in the jungle—­a most fierce outstanding Mohammedan-looking beard that terrified the intrusive into submission.  And yet Bwana C. possesses the kindest blue eyes in the world, full of quiet patience, great understanding, and infinite gentleness.  His manner was abrupt and uncompromising, but he would do anything in the world for one who stood in need of him.  From women he 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 thoroughly shocked our sense of the other fellow’s rights as a human being.  In all this he did not mean to be cruel or inconsiderate.  It was just the way he was built; and it never entered his head that “such people” had ears and brains.