keep up for six months the enthusiasm of his first addresses. Then think what it must have been to him to walk up that great hall, the cynosure of eight thousand pairs of eyes. He followed the Prince of Wales up to the platform, and then, for the first time, I got a chance to study the man about whom all London was raving. As he stood there responding to that princely welcome, my thoughts flew far back to three lonely graves in Africa's palm-clad soil; and, as he read on, I gazed round and round that vast hall, filled with the flower of London society, till a mist came before my eyes. The Prince and Stanley, the lights, the diamonds, and that sea of faces faded away, and in their place seemed the pitiless African sun shining down on the endless panorama of forested river banks, the palmy plains of Langa Langa, the grassy flats of Lomami, and the mighty reaches of the Congo. Again I seemed to hear the war-cry of the Houssas, the rush of water, and the rattle of musketry, with the sharp cracks of the Martinis, answered by the deeper bang of the Arabs' flint locks and muzzle-loaders. It was my first time under fire, and I am afraid that if I had had leisure to analyse my feelings as the slugs began to whistle round us, I should have to acknowledge that I was in a blue funk. But I was kept too busy, till the glamour of fighting was on me, and then I found myself picking out Arabs to aim at, and using my rifle with what now seems to me to have been fiendish deliberation. I thought no more of the slugs, but only of Deane and poor Dubois.[1] We never found out the actual loss of the Arabs, but I feel sure Dubois was well avenged that day. If anything had been wanting to steady my nerves, I had only to glance down at Deane, reduced to a bag of skin and bones, on a rude bed—his head supported on his left hand, while he held a revolver in his right—and in his eyes the light of courage and resolution, which thirty days' starvation and misery in the bush had not been able to quench. Of all that galaxy of beauty, wealth, and fashion, few could realise as I could what the relief of Emin Pasha had really cost, and what Stanley and his companions had gone through."
"I found myself picking out Arabs."
"But I want to know the history of that pebble. Was it at this fight you picked it up?"
"No, it was nearly two years later, at Stanley Falls. Jameson had just come back from Kassongo with Tippoo Tib; and he and Barttelot had left for Yangambi with the 400 carriers whom they were going to march overland from that place to Yambuya. I was to follow a few days later with my chief, and Tippoo Tib was to accompany us. I was down with fever the day
- ↑ Lt. Dubois, who was drowned while trying to escape with Deane when Stanley Falls station was lost.
