lue. That
he was an Everett of Boston conveyed little to those who had not heard
even of Boston. That he was the correspondent of Lowell's Weekly meant
less to those who did not know that Lowell's Weekly existed. And when,
in confusion, he proffered his letter of credit, the very fact that it
called for a thousand pounds was, in the eyes of a "Palm Oil Ruffian,"
sufficient evidence that it had been forged or stolen. He soon saw that
solely as a white man was he accepted and made welcome. That he was
respectable, few believed, and no one cared. To be taken at his face
value, to be refused at the start the benefit of the doubt, was a novel
sensation; and yet not unpleasant. It was a relief not to be accepted
only as Everett the Muckraker, as a professional reformer, as one holier
than others. It afforded his soul the same relaxation that his body
received when, in his shirt-sleeves in the sweltering smoking-room, he
drank beer with a chef de poste who had been thrice tried for murder.

Not only to every one was he a stranger, but to him everything was
strange; so strange as to appear unreal. This did not prevent him from
at once recognizing those things that were not strange, such as corrupt
officials, incompetence, mismanagement. He did not need the missionaries
to point out to him that the Independent State of the Congo was not
a colony administered for the benefit of many, but a vast rubber
plantation worked by slaves to fill the pockets of one man. It was not
in his work that Everett found himself confused. It was in his attitude
of mind toward almost every other question.

At first, when he could not make everything fit his rule of thumb, he
excused the country tolerantly as a "topsy-turvy" land. He wished to
move and act quickly; to make others move quickly. He did not understand
that men who had sentenced themselves to exile for the official term
of three years, or for life, measured time only by the date of their
release. When he learned that even a cablegram could not reach his home
in less than eighteen days, that the missionaries to whom he brought
letters were a three months' journey from the coast and from each other,
his impatience was chastened to wonder, and, later, to awe.

His education began at Matadi, where he waited until the river steamer
was ready to start for Leopoldville. Of the two places he was assured
Matadi was the better, for the reason that if you still were in favor
with the steward of th