eathen priestess! Perish the thought. Sooner would I
be sacrificed to Bonsa."

Then came more illegible pages and again a paragraph that could be
read--"They gave me 'The Bean' in a gold cup, and knowing its deadly
nature I prepared myself for death. But happily for me my stomach,
always delicate, rejected it at once, though I felt queer for days
afterwards. Whereon they clapped their hands and said I was evidently
innocent and a great medicine man."

And again, further on--"never did I see so much gold whether in dust,
nuggets, or worked articles. I imagine it must be worth millions, but
at that time gold was the last thing with which I wished to trouble
myself."

After this entry many pages were utterly effaced.

The last legible passage ran as follows--"So guided by the lad Jeekie,
and wearing the gold mask, Little Bonsa, on my head, I ran through
them all, holding him by the hand as though I were dragging him away.
A strange spectacle I must have been with my old black clergyman's coat
buttoned about me, my naked legs and the gold mask, as pretending to be
a devil such as they worship, I rushed through them in the moonlight,
blowing the whistle in the mask and bellowing like a bull. . . . Such
was the beginning of my dreadful six months' journey to the coast.
Setting aside the mercy of Providence that preserved me for its own
purposes, I could never have lived to reach it had it not been for
Little Bonsa, since curiously enough I found this fetish known and
dreaded for hundreds of miles, and that by people who had never seen it,
yes, even by the wild cannibals. Whenever it was produced food, bearers,
canoes, or whatever else I might want were forthcoming as though by
magic. Great is the fame of Big and Little Bonsa in all that part of
West Africa, although, strange as it may seem, the outlying tribes
seldom mention them by name. If they must speak of either of these
images which are supposed to be man and wife, they call it the
'Yellow-God-who-lives-yonder.'"

Not another word of all this strange history could Alan decipher, so
with aching eyes he shut up the stained and tattered volume, and at
last, just as the day was breaking, fell asleep.

At eleven o'clock on that same morning, for he had slept late, Alan rose
from his breakfast and went to smoke his pipe at the open door of the
beautiful old hall in Yarleys that was clad with brown Elizabethan
oak for which any dealer would have given hundreds of pounds