hundred and fifty miles the fare is two hundred francs, and one is limited to sixty pounds of luggage.  That was the weight allowed by the Japanese to each war correspondent, and as they gave us six months in Tokio in which to do nothing else but weigh our equipment, I left Matadi without a penalty.  Had my luggage exceeded the limit, for each extra pound I would have had to pay the company ten cents.  To the Belgian officers and agents who go for three years to serve the State in the bush the regulation is especially harsh, and in a company so rich, particularly mean.  To many a poor officer, and on the pay they receive there are no rich ones, the tax is prohibitive.  It forces them to leave behind medicines, clothing, photographic supplies, all ammunition, which means no chance of helping out with duck and pigeon the daily menu of goat and tinned sausages, and, what is the greatest hardship, all books.  This regulation, which the State permitted to the concessionaires of the railroad, sends the agents of the State into the wilderness physically and mentally unequipped, and it is no wonder the weaker brothers go mad, and act accordingly.

My black boys travelled second-class, which means an open car with narrow seats very close together and a wooden roof.  On these cars passengers are allowed twenty pounds of luggage and permitted to collect two hundred and fifty miles of heat and dust.  To a black boy twenty pounds is little enough, for he travels with much more baggage than an average “blanc.”  I am not speaking of the Congo boy.  All the possessions the State leaves him he could carry in his pockets, and he has no pockets.  But wherever he goes the Kroo boy, Mendi boy, or Sierra Leone boy carries all his belongings with him in a tin trunk painted pink, green, or yellow.  He is never separated from his “box,” and the recognized uniform of a Kroo boy at work, is his breechcloth, and hanging from a ribbon around his knee, the key to his box.  If a boy has no box he generally carries three keys.

In the first-class car were three French officers en route to Brazzaville, the capital of the French Congo, and a dog, a sad mongrel, very dirty, very hungry.  On each side of the tiny toy car were six revolving-chairs, so the four men, not to speak of the dog, quite filled it.  And to our own bulk each added hand-bags, cases of beer, helmets, gun-cases, cameras, water-bottles, and, as the road does not supply food of any kind, his chop-box.  A chop-box is anything that holds food, and for food of every kind, for the hours of feeding, and the verb “to feed,” on the West Coast, the only word, the “lazy” word, is “chop.”

The absent-minded young missionary, with Fanny jammed between his ankles, and looking out miserably upon the world, and two other young missionaries, travelled second-class.