And Whatever The Coast
May Have To Say Against Me - For My Continual Desire For Hair-Pins,
And Other Pins,
My intolerable habit of getting into water, the
abominations full of ants, that I brought into their houses, or
things
Emitting at unexpectedly short notice vivid and awful
stenches - they cannot but say that I was a diligent pupil, who
honestly tried to learn the lessons they taught me so kindly, though
some of those lessons were hard to a person who had never previously
been even in a tame bit of tropics, and whose life for many years
had been an entirely domestic one in a University town.
One by one I took my old ideas derived from books and thoughts based
on imperfect knowledge and weighed them against the real life around
me, and found them either worthless or wanting. The greatest
recantation I had to make I made humbly before I had been three
months on the Coast in 1893. It was of my idea of the traders.
What I had expected to find them was a very different thing to what
I did find them; and of their kindness to me I can never
sufficiently speak, for on that voyage I was utterly out of touch
with the governmental circles, and utterly dependent on the traders,
and the most useful lesson of all the lessons I learnt on the West
Coast in 1893 was that I could trust them. Had I not learnt this
very thoroughly I could never have gone out again and carried out
the voyage I give you a sketch of in this book.
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