It happened that I had at that time a houseboy, Zacharia, who had lost the fourth finger of his left hand. Perhaps, I thought, this is a common thing with Natives, and is done to facilitate their arithmetic to them, when they are counting upon their fingers.

When I began to develop my ideas to other people, I was stopped, and enlightened. Yet I have still got the feeling that there exists a Native system of numeral characters without the number nine in it, which to them works well and by which you can find out many things.

I have, in this connection, remembered an old Danish clergyman who declared to me that he did not believe that God had created the Eighteenth Century.

When in Africa in March the long rains begin after four months of hot, dry weather, the richness of growth and the freshness and fragrance everywhere are overwhelming.

But the farmer holds back his heart and dares not trust to the generosity of nature, he listens, dreading to hear a decrease in the roar of the falling rain. The water that the earth is now drinking in must bring the farm, with all the vegetable, animal and human life on it, through four rainless months to come.

It is a lovely sight when the roads of the farm have all been turned into streams of running water, and the farmer wades through the mud with a singing heart, out to the flowering and dripping coffee-fields. But it happens in the middle of the rainy season that in the evening the stars show themselves through the thinning clouds; then he stands outside his house and stares up, as if hanging himself on to the sky to milk down more rain. He cries to the sky: “Give me enough and more than enough. My heart is bared to thee now, and I will not let thee go except thou bless me. Drown me if you like, but kill me not with caprices. No coitus interruptus, heaven, heaven!”

Sometimes a cool, colourless day in the months after the rainy season calls back the time of the marka mbaya, the bad year, the time of the drought. In those days the Kikuyu used to graze their cows round my house, and a boy amongst them who had a flute, from time to time played a short tune on it. When I have heard this tune again, it has recalled in one single moment all our anguish and despair of the past. It has got the salt taste of tears in it. But at the same time I found in the tune, unexpectedly surprisingly, a vigour, a curious sweetness, a song. Had those hard times really had all these in them? There was youth in us then, a wild hope. It was during those long days that we were all of us merged into a unity, so that on another planet we shall recognise one another, and the things cry to each other, the cuckoo clock and my books to the lean-fleshed cows on the lawn and the sorrowful old Kikuyus: “You also were there. You also were part of the Ngong farm.” That bad time blessed us and went away.

The friends of the farm came to the house, and went away again. They were not the kind of people who stay for a long time in the same place. They were not the kind of people either who grow old, they died and never came back. But they had sat contented by the fire, and when the house, closing round them, said: “I will not let you go except you bless me,” they laughed and blessed it, and it let them go.

An old lady sat in a party and talked of her life. She declared that she would like to live it all over again, and held this fact to prove that she had lived wisely. I thought: Yes, her life has been the sort of life that should really be taken twice before you can say that you have had it. An arietta you can take da capo, but not a whole piece of music,—not a symphony and not a five-act tragedy either. If it is taken over again it is because it has not gone as it ought to have gone.

My life, I will not let you go except you bless me, but then I will let you go.

One year we had an eclipse of the moon. A short time before it was to take place I had the following letter from the young Indian Stationmaster of Kikuyu station:

The Natives, who have a strong sense of rhythm, know nothing of verse, or at least did not know anything before the times of the schools, where they were taught hymns. One evening out in the maize-field, where we had been harvesting maize, breaking off the cobs and throwing them on to the ox-carts, to amuse myself, I spoke to the field labourers, who were mostly quite young, in Swaheli verse. There was no sense in the verse, it was made for the sake of rhyme:—“Ngumbe na-penda chumbe, Malaya-mbaya. Wakamba na-kula mamba.” The oxen like salt,—whores are bad,—The Wakamba do eat snakes. It caught the interest of the boys, they formed a ring round me. They were quick to understand that the meaning of poetry is of no consequence, and they did not question the thesis of the verse, but waited eagerly for the rhyme, and laughed at it when it came. I tried to make them themselves find the rhyme and finish the poem when I had begun it, but they could not, or would not, do that, and turned away their heads. As they had become used to the idea of poetry, they begged: “Speak again. Speak like rain.” Why they should feel verse to be like rain I do not know. It must have been, however, an expression of applause, since in Africa rain is always longed for and welcomed.

At the time when the near return of Christ to the earth had become a certainty, a Committee was formed to decide upon the arrangements for His reception. After some discussion, it sent out a circular which prohibited all waving and throwing about of palm-branches as well as all cries of “Hosanna.”

When the Millennium had been going on for some time, and joy was universal, Christ one evening said to Peter that He wanted, when everything was quiet, to go out for a short walk with him alone.

“Where do you want to go, my Lord?” Peter asked.

“I should like,” answered the Lord, “just to take a walk from the Praetorium, along that long road, up to the Hill of Calvary.”

Kitosch’s story has been in the papers. A case rose from it, and a jury was set to go through it from beginning to end, searching for enlightenment; some of the enlightenment will still be found in the old documents.

Kitosch was a young Native in the service of a young white settler of Molo. One Wednesday in June, the settler lent his brown mare to a friend, to ride to the station on. He sent Kitosch there to bring back the mare, and told him not to ride her, but to lead her. But Kitosch jumped on to the mare, and rode her back, and on Saturday the settler, his master, was told of the offence by a man who had seen it. In punishment the settler, on Sunday afternoon, had Kitosch flogged, and afterwards tied up in his store, and here late on Sunday night Kitosch died.

Upon the matter the High Court was set in Nakuru, in the Railway Institute, on the 1st of August.

The Natives who gathered and sat round the Railway Institute, will have been wondering what it was all about. To their mind the case was plain, for Kitosch had died, of that there was no doubt, and, according to Native ideas, a compensation for his death should now be made to his people.