he Gold Coast. It
is said of him that he has "never lost a life." On arriving in
London he received a cable telling him three doctors had died, the
miners along the railroad to Ashanti were rotten with fever, and
that he was needed.

[Illustration: The "Mammy Chair" is Like Those Swings You See in
Public Playgrounds.]

So he and his wife, as cheery and bright as though she were setting
forth on her honeymoon, were going back to take up the white man's
burden. We swung them over the side as we had the other two, and
that night in the smoking-room the Coasters drank "Luck to him,"
which, in the vernacular of this unhealthy shore, means "Life to
him," and to the plucky, jolly woman who was going back to fight
death with the man who had never lost a life.

As the ship was getting under way, a young man in "whites" and a sun
helmet, an agent of a trading company, went down the sea ladder by
which I was leaning. He was smart, alert; his sleeves, rolled
recklessly to his shoulders, showed sinewy, sunburnt arms; his
helmet, I noted, was a military one. Perhaps I looked as I felt;
that it was a pity to see so good a man go back to such a land, for
he looked up at me from the swinging ladder and smiled understanding
as though we had been old acquaintances.

"You going far?" he asked. He spoke in the soft, detached voice of
the public-school Englishman.

"To the Congo," I answered.

He stood swaying with the ship, looking as though there were
something he wished to say, and then laughed, and added gravely,
giving me the greeting of the Coast: "Luck to you."

"Luck to YOU," I said.

That is the worst of these gaddings about, these meetings with men
you wish you could know, who pass like a face in the crowded street,
who hold out a hand, or give the password of the brotherhood, and
then drop down the sea ladder and out of your life forever.

II

MY BROTHER'S KEEPER

To me, the fact of greatest interest about the Congo is that it is
owned, and the twenty millions of people who inhabit it are owned by
one man. The land and its people are his private property. I am not
trying to say that he governs the Congo. He does govern it, but that
in itself would not be of interest. His claim is that he owns it.
Though backed by all the mailed fists in the German Empire, and all
the _Dreadnoughts_ of the seas, no other modern monarch would make
such a claim. It does not sound like anything we have heard since
the days a