Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/279

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a native to a better life. The natives so easily forget my teaching that I am sometimes troubled with the fear that all my work has been in vain."

Wherever I go, I hear grave doubts expressed as to the missionary experiment. . . . Most of the Americans I meet here were originally in sympathy with the English, so far as the Boer war was concerned, but ended by being in sympathy with the Boers. . . . There is a man here named Sir Abe Bailey. It seems to me that a man with a title should not be called "Abe," but "Sir Cecil," or "Sir Chauncey," or something else equally euphonious. . . . Natives are publicly whipped here, when they do not behave. And when a native is killed in the mines or elsewhere, the papers do not print his name; they refer to him simply as a "native.". . . This evening we dined with Mr. and Mrs. Atterbury and their young gentleman son, Manfred, at the Grand National Hotel, where they live. Manfred Atterbury was born in Maysville, Missouri, but came here as a baby, and has never been back to the country of his birth. He is exactly like an American boy, except that he occasionally uses the expression, "You see," which is used so much over here that I am contracting the habit myself. He has attended English and Boer schools, and, like the Texas congressman, doesn't know where he is at. His mother, who took charge of her son's education, as good mothers do, tells some amusing stories about it. One day the boy was sent to the foot of his class for pronouncing "Chicago" as it is pronounced everywhere in the United States. The teacher said the correct pronunciation was "Chic-a-go." The young man also got in trouble