The traders who were making the world smaller by bringing cotton prints to Chinde to cover her black nakedness, her British Majesty’s consul at that port, and the boy lieutenant of the paddle-wheeled gunboat which patrols the Zambesi River, were the gentlemen who informed me that they were the only respectable members of Chinde society.  They came over the side with the gratitude of sailors whom the Kanzlar might have picked up from a desert island, where they had been marooned and left to rot.  They observed the gilded glory of the Kanzlar smoking-room, its mirrors and marble-topped tables, with the satisfaction and awe of the California miner, who found all the elegance of civilization in the red plush of a Broadway omnibus.  The boy-commander of the gunboat gazed at white women in the saloon with fascinated admiration.

“I have never,” he declared, breathlessly, “I have never seen so many beautiful women in one place at the same time!  I’d forgotten that there were so many white people in the world.”

“If I stay on board this ship another minute I shall go home,” said Her Majesty’s consul, firmly.  “You will have to hold me.  It’s coming over me—­I feel it coming.  I shall never have the strength to go back.”  He appealed to the sympathetic lieutenant.  “Let’s desert together,” he begged.

 [Illustration:  One-half of the Street Cleaning Department of
 Mozambique.]

In the swamps of the East Coast the white exiles lay aside the cloaks and masks of crowded cities.  They do not try to conceal their feelings, their vices, or their longings.  They talk to the first white stranger they meet of things which in the great cities a man conceals even from his room-mate, and men they would not care to know, and whom they would never meet in the fixed social pathways of civilization, they take to their hearts as friends.  They are too few to be particular, they have no choice, and they ask no questions.  It is enough that the white man, like themselves, is condemned to exile.  They do not try to find solace in the thought that they are the “foretrekkers” of civilization, or take credit to themselves because they are the path-finders and the pioneers who bear the heat and burden of the day.  They are sorry for themselves, because they know, more keenly than any outsider can know, how good is the life they have given up, and how hard is the one they follow, but they do not ask anyone else to be sorry.  They would be very much surprised if they thought you saw in their struggle against native and Portuguese barbarism, fever, and savage tribes, a life of great good and value, full of self-renunciation, heroism, and self-sacrifice.

On the day they boarded the Kanzlar the pains of nostalgia were sweeping over the respectable members of Chinde society like waves of nausea, and tearing them.  With a grim appreciation of their own condition, they smiled mockingly at the ladies on the quarter-deck, as you have seen prisoners grin through the bars; they were even boisterous and gay, but their gayety was that of children at recess, who know that when the bell rings they are going back to the desk.