POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA 303

into the music room, a little cramped mid-Victorian
parlour with family groups on the walls, the Venus
of Milo, hideous coloured plaster casts of Tyrolean
boys in sentimental attitudes, and paraffin lamps on
high occasional tables. He played some songs the
President had composed; the piano, of course, in that
climate was out of tune. They were rather noisy,
breathless songs, of which the President had written
the words as well as the music; romantic love and
piety: "Ave Maria" and "I sent my love a red, red
rose, and she returned me a white." Then he played
the President's setting of "I arise from dreams of
thee". His friend the President, he said sadly, twirling
on his stool, had once written much music and
poetry: now—the Secretary of the Treasury sighed at
the way in which politics encroached. He said,
"Perhaps you know this song," and while the clerks
from the Treasury went round lighting the paraffin
lamps and turning the shades so that the glow fell in
a friendly way on the Tyrolean children caressing
their dogs or listening to stories at their mother's
knees, he began to sing: <rWhate'er befall I still recall
that sun-lit mountain side." It was sesthetidsm at the
lowest level if you will, but it was genuine aestheticism.
The pathos of it was that this was the best material
coastal Liberia could offer to a sensitive gentle mind:
the music of Mr. Edwin Barclay, the plaster casts, The
Maid of the Mountains, the paraffin lamps, a senti-
mental song called Treesy and the President's patriotic
verses which he now beat out upon the piano: The
Lone Star Forever.