Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. THE RETURN OF THE ADVENTURERS jHESE things happened in the time of the new moon. All that moon and when that moon was lost Mejo did the work of Assam in the village. In the morning and in the evening he called the villagers to assemble and he read to them the Word of God and prayed. More and more of the villagers answered the call to these daily gatherings, when the book of God was opened up to them by a little lad. On a Sunday he called them for a service, and they began to learn the custom of the service, singing with the school children, and stumbling along with the recitation of the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments. In all these matters Mejo tried to conduct himself like Assam. He was not thinking now of Livingstone or Susi or Chuma—he was remembering his brother Assam, who was so kind and so dignified and so quiet. When in the morning he opened the school, standing by his table before the rows of boys,—so many of them bigger and older than himself—he stood like Assam. He met all those attentive eyes with Assam's expression, and in the voice of Assam he gave his orders. He had no time to be frightened or to be proud. He put the boys who were studying the advanced charts over the laggards who were still stumbling through the alphabet. He exacted, with a severity which he had learned from Assam, a good physical discipline. Classes rose on signal like one man. Silence reigned, broken only by the murmur of recitations; an austere little teacher hunted and reproved dirty hands and jiggered feet from class to class. Bekalli, swaggering into the school one day early in Assam's absence, was greeted in order. The school rose like a machine; many voices like one voice said, "Our chief! Mbolo." And like a machine the many brown bodies were seated....