"CIVILISED MAN" 237

We will o'er all prevail.

With heart and hand our country's cause

defending,

We'll meet the foe with valour unpretending.
Long live Liberia, happy land,
A home of glorious liberty by God's command.

The patriotic sentiments sounded better as I heard
4them later bawled by a school of two hundred
children in Monrovia; here it was "the land be-
nighted", the tall trees standing like cliffs of dull green
stone on either side, which really prevailed. After a
while Victor Prosser ceased to sing and dropped
farther and farther behind in his flopping slippers.
I could hear him humming Venite, Adoremus, as we
passed the coffin-shaped holes dug by some Dutch
prospector, who had been that way alone a year
before.

Toweh-Ta was quite a large town; a Paramount
Chief had his compound there, and the forest was
cleared away from its outskirts. A broad bare road
sloped up to it and a big square hut behind a fence
at the beginning of the road was Victor Prosser's
school. His manner had altered; here he was someone
of importance. It was about half-past nine by our
time, which agreed roughly with the handsome silver
watch Victor Prosser had won on the Coast. School,
he said, would have started; his assistant would be
controlling the boys till his coming, and he asked us
in to see the class at work. But when he opened the
door there was no class: only a little room of empty
benches, a cane balanced on two nails, a desk which
just succeeded in standing on four loose crooked legs.