unfit for white consumption, but the natives regard it as a luxury. The
white man who kills a hippo is immediately acclaimed a hero. One reason
is that with spears the black finds it difficult to get the better of
one of these animals.

Our first step was at a Lutheran Mission set in the middle of a populous
village. As we approached I saw the American flag hanging over the door
of the most pretentious mud and grass house. When I went ashore I found
that the missionaries--a man and his wife--were both American citizens.
The husband was a Swede who had gone out to Kansas in his boyhood to
work on a farm. There he married a Kansas girl, who now speaks English
with a Swedish accent. After spreading the gospel in China and
elsewhere, they settled down in this lonely spot on the Kasai River.

I was immediately impressed with the difference between the Congo River
and the Kasai. The Congo is serene, brooding, majestic, and fringed
with an endless verdure. The Kasai, although 1,500 miles in length, is
narrower and more pugnacious. Its brown banks and grim flanking
mountains offer a welcome change from the eternal green of the great
river that gives the Colony its name. The Kasai was discovered by
Livingstone in 1854.

I also got another change. Two days after I left Dima we were blanketed
with heavy fog every morning and the air was raw and chill. On the Kasai
you can have every experience of trans-Atlantic travel with the sole
exception of seasickness.

As I proceeded up the Kasai I found continued evidence of the advance in
price of every food commodity. The omnipresent chicken that fetched a
franc in 1914 now brings from five to ten. My old friend the goat has
risen from ten to thirty francs and he was as tough as ever, despite the
rise. But foodstuffs are only a small part of these Congo economic
troubles.

We have suffered for some time under the burden of our inseparable
companion, the High Cost of Living. It is slight compared with the High
Cost of Loving in the Congo. Here you touch a real hardship. Before the
war a first-class wife--all wives are bought--sold for fifty francs.
Today the market price for a choice spouse is two hundred francs and it
takes hard digging for the black man to scrape up this almost
prohibitive fee. Thus the High Cost of Matrimony enters the list of
universal distractions.

On the "Madeleine" was a fascinating black child named Nanda. He was
about five years old and strolled about th