The whole of my childhood and youth was spent at home, in the house and garden. The living outside world I saw little of, and cared less for, for I felt myself out of place at the few parties I ever had the chance of going to, and I deservedly was unpopular with my own generation, for I knew nothing of play and such things. But this was not superiority of mind in me, at all; the truth was I had a great amusing world of my own other people did not know, or care about - that was in the books in my father's library.

They were mostly old books on the West Indies, and old medical books, and old travel books and what not; fiction was represented in it by the works of Smollett, and little else. No one would believe the number, or character, of the books I absorbed. My favourites among them were Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Johnson's Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates, and Bayle's Dictionary. When my father was home from one of his long and many journey's, new books used to come into the house, and although I did not like them as the old, yet they had to be read too. But just as I was coming to the conclusion that new books were unworthy of my serious attention, one turned up that fascinated me wildly. It was Solar Physics, by Professor Norman Lockyer. That book opened a new world for me.

I confess that in the old days I used to contemplate with a feeling of irritation the way in which my father used to reconcile and explain it to himself, that because he had a wife and family it was his dire and awful duty to go and hunt grizzly bears in a Red Indian infested district, and the like. I fancy now that I was wrong to have felt any irritation with him. It is undoubtedly true that he could have made more money had he settled down to an English practice as a physician; also undoubtedly true that he thoroughly enjoyed grizzly bear hunting and "loved the bright eyes of danger"; still there was in him enough of the natural man to give him the instinctive feeling that the duty of a father was to go out hunting and fighting while his wife kept the home. But I am fully convinced that his taking this view of life really caused the illness which killed my mother. For months at a time she was kept in an unbroken strain of anxiety about him.

I have always a feeling of responsibility. All through the fifteen years during which I nursed my mother and watched over my brother's delicate health, I never felt "it was all for the best", but only that perhaps I could make things better for them - if only I knew how, or were more able; and I tried my best, and I know I failed, for my mother's sufferings were terrible, and my brother's health is still far from what I should wish.

It is at these times that you realize the blessings of a good thick skirt. Had I paid heed to the advice of many people in England and adopted masculine garments, I should have been spiked to the bone and done for. Whereas, save for a good many bruises, here I was with the fullness of my skirt tucked under me, sitting on nine ebony spikes some twelve inches long, in comparative comfort.

My first friends, among them my fellow-passengers on the Lagos, failing in inducing me to return from Sierra Leone did their best to save me by means of education. The things they thought I "really ought to know" would make wild reading if published in extenso. Led by the kindest most helpful of captains, they poured in information. To my listening to everything that was told me by my first instructors, and believing it, undoubtedly I have often owed my life.

Miss Kingsley cannot be portrayed. She had an individuality as pronounced as it was unique, with charm of manner and conversation, while the interplay of wit and mild satire, of pure spontaneous mirth and of profoundly deep seriousness, made her a series of surprises, each one tenderer and more surprising than the foregoing.

The mangrove swamp follows the general rule for West Africa, and night in it is noisier than the day. After dark it is full of noises; grunts from I know not what, splashes from jumping fish, the peculiar whir of rushing crabs, and quaint creaking and groaning sounds from the trees; and - above all in eeriness - the strange whine and sighing cough of crocodiles. I shall never forget one moonlight night I spent in a mangrove swamp. I was not lost, we had gone away into the swamp from the main river, so that the natives of a village with an evil reputation should not come across us when they were out fishing. Now and again the strong musky smell came that meant a crocodile close by.

There is nothing so fascinating as spending a night out in an African forest but, I do not advise anyone to follow the practice. Nor indeed do I recommend African forest life to anyone. Unless you are interested in it and fall under its charm. It is like being shut up in a library whose books you cannot read, all the while tormented, terrified, and bored. Still it is good for a man to have experience of it, whether he likes it or not, for it teaches you how very dependent you have been during your previous life on the familiarity of those conditions you have been brought up among, and on your fellow-citizens.

As it is with the forest, so it is with the minds of the natives. Unless you live alone among the natives, you never get a light into the true state of their mind forest. At first you see nothing but a confused stupidity and crime; but when you get to see - as in the other forest - you see things worth seeing.

The next morning the Fans started selling me their store of elephant tusks and rubber. I did not want those things then, but still felt too nervous of the Fans to point this out firmly, and so had to buy. I made it as long an affair as I could and I gradually found myself the proud owner of balls of rubber and a tooth or so and alas my little stock of cloth and tobacco all going fast. Now to be short of money anywhere is bad, but to be short of money in a Fan village is extremely bad, because these Fans, when a trader has no more goods to sell them, are liable to start trade all over again by killing him, and taking back their ivory and rubber and keeping it until another trader comes along.

All my trader stuff was by now exhausted, and I had to start selling my own belongings, and for the first time in my life I felt the want of a big outfit. My own clothes I certainly did insist on having more for, pointing out that they were rare and curious. A dozen white ladies' blouses sold well. I cannot say they looked well when worn by a brawny warrior in conjunction with nothing else but red paint and a bunch of leopard tails, particularly when the warrior failed to tie the strings at the back. But I did not hint at this, and I quite realize that a pair of stockings can be made to go further than we make them by using one at a time and putting the top part over the head and letting the rest of the garment float on the breeze.

My nervousness regarding the big game of Africa is of a rather peculiar kind. I can confidently say that I am not afraid of any wild animal - until I see it - and then - well I will yield to nobody in terror; fortunately my terror is a special variety. You can suppress alarm, excitement, fear, fright, and all those small-fry emotions, but the real terror is as dependent on the inner make of you as the colour of your eyes, or the shape of your nose; and when terror ascends its throne in my mind I become eternally artful, and intelligent to an extent utterly foreign to my true nature.

I have no hesitation is saying that the gorilla is the most horrible wild animal I have seen. I have seen at close quarters specimens of the most important big game of Central Africa, and with the exception of snakes, I have run away from all of them; but although elephants, leopards, and pythons give you a feeling of alarm, they do not give that feeling of horrible disgust that an old gorilla gives on account of its hideousness of appearance.

I had got caught in a tornado in a dense forest. The massive mighty trees were waving like a wheatfield gale in England. The great trees creaked and groaned and strained against it and the bush-rope cables strained and smacked like whips, and ever and anon a thundering crash with snaps like pistol shots told that they and their mighty tree had strained and struggled in vain. The fierce rain came in a roar, tearing to shreds the leaves and blossoms and deluging everything.

Climbing up over a lot of rocks out of a gully bottom where I had been half drowned in a stream, and getting my head to the level of a block of rock, I observed right in front of my eyes, broadside on, maybe a yard off, certainly not more, a big leopard. He was crouching on the ground, with his magnificent head thrown back and his eyes shut. His forepaws were spread out in front of him and he lashed the ground with his tail, and I grieve to say, in face of that awful danger - I don't mean me, but the tornado - that depraved creature swore softly, but repeatedly and profoundly.

I did not get all these facts up in one glance, for no sooner did I see him than I ducked under the rocks, and remembered thankfully that leopards are said to have no power of smell. But I heard his observations on the weather, and the flip-flap of his tail on the ground. Every now and then I cautiously took a look at him with one eye round a rock-edge, and he remained in the same position. My feelings tell me he remained there twelve months, but my calmer judgments puts the time down at twenty-minutes; and at last, on taking another cautious peep, I saw he was gone. He had moved off in one of those weird lulls which you get in a tornado.

The white race seems to me to blame in saying that all the reason for its interference in Africa is the improvement of the native African, and then to start on altering African institutions without in the least understanding them. It seems to me that the leading men among the European educated Africans have depended too much on the religious side of the question.

I know that there is a general opinion among the leading men of both races that Christianity will give the one possible solution to the whole problem. I fail to be able to believe this. I fail to believe Christianity will bring peace between the two races, for the simple reason that though it may be possible to convert Africans en masse into practical Christians it is quite impossible to convert Europeans en masse to it.

Whether I shall come up out of this, I don't know. It is a desperate game I am playing here, and it is doubtful. One nurse and an orderly who have only been on two days are down themselves. The stench, the washing, the enemas, the bed pans, the blood, is my world. Not London society, politics, that gateway into which I so strangely wandered.

I was sent to Simonstown to combat the crisis created by the outbreak of enteric fever among the Boer prisoners of war, and after I had been here about a week Miss Kingsley joined me in the capacity of a Nursing Sister and between us in an incredibly short time we converted chaos into order, or as she herself has written it, converted "a mortuary into a sanitarium".

Unfortunately as events have shown she greatly overtaxes her strength, and this wretched war claims yet another brilliant victim, a thoroughly good woman of giant intellect whom this world can ill spare. I shall always recall Miss Kingsley's memory as one of the saddest and greatest friendships of my life.

It will be of great satisfaction to her brother and her friends to know that though only two months in Simonstown she had won the love and respect of all, and her funeral at sea, in accordance with her most definitely expressed wishes, was I suppose the most imposing obsequies this small place has ever witnessed.

It is difficult in speaking of the premature death of Miss Mary Kingsley not to use language which to those who did not know her, or only knew her as it were, from the outside, may seem to savour of exaggeration. To those, on the other hand, who knew her as she was, with all the variety of her richly endowed nature, her commanding intellect, her keen insight, her originality, her tenderness, her simplicity, her absolute freedom from cant or pretense, her delightful humour, her extraordinary grasp of the problems, physical, ethnological, or political, to which as occasion arose she turned her attention, any attempt to portray her character or to estimate by how much the world is the poorer for her loss must fall short of reality.

It was written on the book of Fate that she (Mary Kingsley) should die just as the practical usefulness of her work, its high morality and extreme accuracy, were forcing themselves upon the notice of her contemporaries in politics, administration and commerce, and upon the imagination of thinking England.

Those who knew her, and believed in her knowledge and capacity, are asking themselves today whether she died too soon for her counsels to have made any but a fleeting impression upon the minds of men, or whether they have taken root and are destined to bring forth fruit.