flag. Never before did the Stars and Stripes seem so beautiful. I am glad Miss Grover put one in my box. * * * * I do praise God for every step I get nearer to my future home. We expect to sail next Wednesday, April 17, from Rotterdam on the steamer African, Dutch line. We hope to get to the Congo in three weeks."

For two years she labored at Palabala, frequently writing letters home and occasionally sending back to her beloved Spelman a box of curios. Said she of those among whom she worked: "When the people are first gathered into a chapel for school or religious services, it is sad and amusing to see how hard they try to know just what to do, a number sitting with their backs to the preacher or teacher. When the teacher reproves a child, every man, woman, and child feels it his or her duty to yell out too at the offender and tell him to obey the teacher. Often in the midst of a sermon a man in the congregation will call out to the preacher, 'Take away your lies,' or 'We do not believe you,' or 'How can this or that be?' One of the first workers, after speaking to a crowd of heathen, asked them all to close their eyes and bow their heads while he would pray to God. When the missionary had finished his prayer and opened his eyes, every person had stealthily left the place." Then followed a detail of the atrocities in the Congo and of the encounters between the natives and the Belgian officers, and last of all came the pertinent comment: "The Congo missionary's work is twofold. He must civilize, as well as Christianize, the people."

Early in 1891 Nora Gordon, sadly in need of rest and refreshment, went from Palabala for a little stay at Lukungu. Hither had come Clara A. Howard, Spelman's second representative, under appointment of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the East. Lukungu is a station two hundred and twenty miles from the mouth of the Congo, in a populous district, and was the center from which numerous other schools and churches sprang. The work was in charge of Mr. Hoste, an Englishman, who, when Miss Gordon wrote of him in 1894, had spent ten years on the Congo without going home. Other men were associated with him, while the elementary schools, the care of the boys and girls, and work among the women, naturally fell to the women missionaries. A little later in 1891 Nora Gordon left Palabala permanently to engage in the work at Lukungu. Under date September 25 she wrote to her friends back home: "Doubtless Clara has told you of my change to this place. You can not imagine how glad we are to be together here. I have charge of the printing-office and help in the afternoon school. I am well, happy, and am enjoying my work. In the office I have few conveniences and really not the things we need. Mr. Hoste has written the first arithmetic in this language and I am now putting it up. I was obliged to stop work on it to-day because my figures in type gave out, and you know we have no shops in this land. My boys in the office are doing nicely."

Thus she worked on for two years more—hoping, praying, trusting. By 1893 her health was in such condition that it was deemed wise for her to return to America. So she did, and she brought back two native girls with her. All the while, however, her chief thought was upon the work to which she had given herself, and she constantly looked forward to the time when she might be able to go back to Africa. In 1895 she became the wife of Rev. S. C. Gordon, who was connected with the English Baptist Mission at Stanley Pool. She sailed with her husband from Boston in July and reached the Congo again in August. The station was unique. It was an old and well established mission, the center of several others in the surrounding country. It had excellent brick houses, broad avenues and good fruit-trees, and the students were above the average in intelligence. But soon the shadow fell. Nora Gordon herself saw much of the well known Belgian atrocities in the Congo. She saw houses burned and the natives themselves driven out by the state officials. They crossed over into the French Congo; but hither Protestants were not allowed to come to preach to them. In spite of the great heartache, however, and declining health the heroic woman worked on, giving to those for whom she labored her tenderest love. Seven months after the death of her second child a change was again deemed necessary, and she once more turned her face homeward. After two months in Belgium and England she came again to America, and to Spelman. But her strength was now all spent. She died at Spelman January 26, 1901. She was only thirty-four; but who can measure in years the love and faith, the hope and sorrow, of such a life?

Nora Gordon started a tradition, Spelman's richest heritage. Three other graduates followed her. Clara Howard was in course of time forced by the severe fevers to give up her work, and she now labors at home in the service of her Alma Mater. Ada Jackson became the second wife of Rev. S. C. Gordon and also died in service. Emma B. DeLany was commissioned in 1900 and still labors—in recent years with larger and larger success—in Liberia. Within two or three years of Nora Gordon's return in 1893, moreover, not less than five native African girls had come to Spelman. The spirit still abides, and if the way were just a little clearer doubtless many other graduates would go. Even as it is, however, the blessing to the school has been illimitable.

Such have been the workers, such the pioneers. To what end is the love, the labor—the loneliness, the yearning?

It is now nearly five hundred years since a prince of Portugal began the slave-trade on the west coast of Africa. Within two hundred years all of the leading countries of western Europe had joined in the iniquitous traffic, and when England in 1713 drew up with France the Peace of Utrecht she deemed the slave-trade of such importance that she insisted upon an article that gave her a practical monopoly of it. Before the end of the eighteenth century, however, the voice of conscience began to be heard in England, and science also began to be interested in the great undeveloped continent lying to the South. It remained for the work of David Livingstone, however, in the middle of the nineteenth century really to reveal Africa to the rest of the world. This intrepid explorer and missionary in a remarkable series of journeys not only traversed the continent from the extreme South to Loanda on the West Coast and Quilimane on the East Coast; he not only made known the great lake system of Central Africa; but he left behind him a memory that has blessed everyone who has followed in his steps. Largely as a result of his work and that of his successor, Stanley, a great congress met in Berlin in 1884 for the partition of Africa among the great nations of Europe. Unfortunately the diplomats at this meeting were not actuated by the noble impulses that had moved Livingstone, so that more and more there was evident a mad scramble for territory. France had already gained a firm foothold in the northwest, and England was not only firmly intrenched in the South but had also established a rather undefined protectorate over Egypt. Germany now in 1884 entered the field and in German East Africa, German Southwest Africa, Kamerun, and the smaller territory of Togoland in the West ultimately acquired a total of nearly a million square miles, or one-eleventh of the continent. All of this she lost in the course of the recent great war. Naturally she has desired to regain this land, but at the time of writing (November, 1918) there is no likelihood of her doing so, a distinguished Englishman, Mr. Balfour, the foreign