he men themselves like things
that way. The men of Calabar have learned that when the sun is at
110, morals, like material things, disintegrate, and that, though
the temptation is to go about in bath-room slippers and pajamas, one
is wiser to bolster up his drenched and drooping spirit with a stiff
shirt front and a mess jacket. They tell that in a bush station in
upper Nigeria, one officer got his D.S.O. because with an audience
of only a white sergeant he persisted in a habit of shaving twice a
day.

[Illustration: The Home of the Thirty Queens of King Mango Bell.]

There are very few women in Calabar. There are three or four who are
wives of officials, two nurses employed by the government, and the
Mother Superior and Sisters of the Order of St. Joseph, and, of
course, all of them are great belles. For the Sisters, especially
the officers, the government people, the traders, the natives, even
the rival missionaries, have the most tremendous respect and
admiration. The sacrifice of the woman who, to be near her husband
on the Coast, consents to sicken and fade and grow old before her
time, and of the nurse who, to preserve the health of others, risks
her own, is very great; but the sacrifice of the Sisters, who have
renounced all thought of home and husband, and who have exiled
themselves to this steaming swamp-land, seems the most unselfish. In
order to support the 150 little black boys and girls who are at
school at the mission, the Sisters rob themselves of everything
except the little that will keep them alive. Two, in addition to
their work at the mission, act as nurses in the English hospital,
and for that they receive together $600. This forms the sole regular
income of the five women; for each $120 a year. With anything else
that is given them in charity, they buy supplies for the little
converts. They live in a house of sandstone and zinc that holds the
heat like a flat-iron, they are obliged to wear a uniform that is of
material and fashion so unsuited to the tropics that Dr. Chichester,
in charge of the hospital, has written in protest against it to
Rome, and on many days they fast, not because the Church bids them
so to do, but because they have no food. And with it all, these five
gentlewomen are always eager, cheerful, sweet of temper, and a
living blessing to all who meet them. What now troubles them is that
they have no room to accommodate the many young heathen who come to
them to be taught to wea