about so dirty, so unwholesome, so avoided, through the fresh green country; or, perhaps, he couldn't help it, and would rather be clean and brisk if he could. But this man certainly looked as though he didn't care, and the boy dismissed him from his mind almost as soon as he passed from sight.
And so it was all the afternoon—one thing after another falling upon his mind like a cloud, and then moving off again and leaving him idle as sunny water in a shallow bed. All the time he was dissatisfied. It wasn't that he was solitary, for he liked being alone to watch things and wonder how they came; but something flawed his mind or memory, and the day became uneasy. It was nearly tea-time when he reached the village, and he quickened his steps because his home was at the other end. The village slept perfectly; everybody was asleep, or shut within the blind walls and drinking tea; it seemed the quietest place in the world—the dullest. Nothing could happen there. . . . And nothing happened when he reached home, except that his mother remarked that he was a little late, and asked how he had spent the day. She frowned, he fancied, when he spoke of Boney and Myra, but she was still sedate as ever when she asked if Mrs Alexander had been at home. After tea his mother reminded him of his promise to read French every day during the holidays, and with this and idler matters the evening began to slip softly away.
But his quiet mind was shaken by the casual sight of a book he had often meant to read—Captain Singleton, a recent gift from someone who knew nothing of it but that it was by the author of Robinson Crusoe. It was a sheer misadventure that led Richard to open it now, and read of—Africa, dark forests, cruelties done upon the black people of the mysterious land; everywhere echoes of the magical, dark, bright Gold Coast. Richard read, then dipped, his head confused by the tangle of suggestion and picture, a tangle thick and clinging as the creepers of the forests and the fever-creepers hanging there. The book dropped from his hand and he sat perfectly still, thinking not of the Captain nor of the subtle Quaker and the men, but of his father. His father was even yet, maybe, even this aching evening, lonely and unsupported on the Gold Coast. Why wouldn't his mother speak? He looked at her, as she sat upright, knitting. There was no noise in the room but that of the clicking needles, and the moth wings against the lamp-shade;
