POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA 309

Welcome, welcome, thou season of rest and ease,
The year has brought thee from across the seas;
O bid fair, bid fair to us to make us please,
To sing this longing strain for aye,
Flo-re-at Col-le-gi-um Li-be-ria!

Return

But though it was this impression that followed me
on board the cargo steamer which had been wirelessed
to call off Monrovia for passengers, the memory, too,
of hundreds of children in the Catholic school bellow-
ing out the National Anthem:

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

—one realised, going out by surf boat towards the bar,
that thin line of white which divided this world from
the other, the world of the smokestack, the siren that
called us impatiently on board, the officer on the cap-
tain's bridge who watched us through glasses, how
much less separated they really were from the true
primitive than we. It was at their back, it wasn't
centuries away. If they had taken the wrong road,
they had only to retrace their steps a very little dis-
tance in space and not in time. The little jetty moved
jerkily backwards, the river came into sight, the
silver mangrove branches straddling like the ribs of
old umbrellas on either side. Two hundred and §fty