All steamers for the Upper Congo and her great tributaries, whether they belong to the State or the Missions, start from Leopoldville.  There they fit out for voyages, some of which last three and four months.  So it is a place of importance, but, like Boma, it looks as though the people who yesterday built it meant to-morrow to move out.  The river-front is one long dump-heap.  It is a grave-yard for rusty boilers, deck-plates, chains, fire-bars.  The interior of the principal storehouse for ships’ supplies, directly in front of the office of the captain of the port, looks like a junk-shop for old iron and newspapers.  I should have enjoyed taking the captain of the port by the neck and showing him the water-front and marine shops at Calabar; the wharfs and quays of stone, the open places spread with gravel, the whitewashed cement gutters, the spare parts of machinery, greased and labeled in their proper shelves, even the condemned scrap-iron in orderly piles; the whole yard as trim as a battleship.

On the river-front at Leopoldville a grossly fat man, collarless, coatless, purple-faced, perspiring, was rushing up and down.  He was the captain of the port.  Black women had assembled to greet returning black soldiers, and the captain was calling upon the black sentries to drive them away.  The sentries, yelling, fell upon the women with their six-foot staves and beat them over the head and bare shoulders, and as they fled, screaming, the captain of the port danced in the sun shaking his fists after them and raging violently.  Next morning I was told he had tried to calm his nerves with absinthe, which is not particularly good for nerves, and was exceedingly unwell.  I was sorry for him.  The picture of discipline afforded by the glazed-eyed official, reeling and cursing in the open street, had been illuminating.

Although at Leopoldville the State has failed to build wharfs, the esthetic features of the town have not been neglected, and there is a pretty plaza called Stanley Park.  In the centre of this plaza is a pillar with, at its base, a bust of Leopold, and on the top of the pillar a plaster-of-Paris lady, nude, and, not unlike the Bacchante of MacMonnies.  Not so much from the likeness as from history, I deduced that the lady must be Cleo de Merode.  But whether the monument is erected to her or to Leopold, or to both of them, I do not know.

 [Illustration:  The Monument in Stanley Park, Erected, not to
 Stanley, but to Leopold.]

I left Leopoldville in the Deliverance.  Some of the State boats that make the long trip to Stanleyville are very large ships.  They have plenty of deck room and many cabins.  With their flat, raft-like hull, their paddle-wheel astern, and the covered sun deck, they resemble gigantic house-boats.  Of one of these boats the Deliverance was only one-third the size, but I took passage on her because she would give me a chance to see not only something