Thanks To "The Agent," I Have Visited Places I Could Never Otherwise
Have Seen; And To The Respect And Affection In Which He Is Held By
The Native, I Owe It That I Have Done So In Safety.
When I have
arrived off his factory in a steamer or canoe unexpected,
unintroduced, or turned up equally unheralded
Out of the bush in a
dilapidated state, he has always received me with that gracious
hospitality which must have given him, under Coast conditions, very
real trouble and inconvenience - things he could have so readily
found logical excuses against entailing upon himself for the sake of
an individual whom he had never seen before - whom he most likely
would never see again - and whom it was no earthly profit to him to
see then. He has bestowed himself - Allah only knows where - on his
small trading vessels so that I might have his one cabin. He has
fished me out of sea and fresh water with boat-hooks; he has
continually given me good advice, which if I had only followed would
have enabled me to keep out of water and any other sort of
affliction; and although he holds the meanest opinion of my
intellect for going to such a place as West Africa for beetles,
fishes and fetish, he has given me the greatest assistance in my
work. The value of that work I pray you withhold judgment on, until
I lay it before you in some ten volumes or so mostly in Latin.
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