The story of the taking of Isisi village, and the crowning of the young king, was told in the London newspapers, and lost nothing in the telling. It was so described by the special correspondents, who accompanied the expedition, that many dear old ladies of Bayswater wept, and many dear young ladies of Mayfair said: "How sweet!" and the outcome of the many emotions which the description evoked was the sending out from England of Miss Clinton Calbraith, who was an M.A., and unaccountably pretty.
She came out to "mother" the orphan king, to be a mentor and a friend. She paid her own passage, but the books which she brought and the school paraphernalia that filled two large packing cases were subscribed for by the tender readers of Tiny Toddlers, a magazine for infants. Sanders met her on the landing-stage, being curious to see what a white woman looked like.
He put a hut at her disposal and sent the wife of his coast clerk to look after her.
"And now, Miss Calbraith," he said, at dinner that night, "what do you expect to do with Peter?"
She tilted her pretty chin in the air reflectively.
"We shall start with the most elementary of lessons--the merest kindergarten, and gradually work up. I shall teach him calisthenics, a little botany--Mr. Sanders, you're laughing."
"No, I wasn't," he hastened to assure her; "I always make a face like that--er--in the evening. But tell me this--do you speak the language--Swaheli, Bomongo, Fingi?"
"That will be a difficulty," she said thoughtfully.
"Will you take my advice?" he asked.
"Why, yes."
"Well, learn the language." She nodded. "Go home and learn it." She frowned. "It will take you about twenty-five years."
"Mr. Sanders," she said, not without dignity, "you are pulling--you are making fun of me."
"Heaven forbid!" said Sanders piously, "that I should do anything so wicked."
The end of the story, so far as Miss Clinton Calbraith was concerned, was that she went to Isisi, stayed three days, and came back incoherent.
"He is not a child!" she said wildly; "he is--a--a little devil!"
"So I should say," said Sanders philosophically.
"A king? It is disgraceful! He lives in a mud hut and wears no clothes. If I'd known!"
"A child of nature," said Sanders blandly. "You didn't expect a sort of Louis Quinze, did you?"
"I don't know what I expected," she said desperately; "but it was impossible to stay--quite impossible."
"Obviously," murmured Sanders.
"Of course, I knew he would be black," she went on; "and I knew that--oh, it was too horrid!"
"The fact of it is, my dear young lady," said Sanders, "Peter wasn't as picturesque as you imagined him; he wasn't the gentle child with pleading eyes; and he lives messy--is that it?"
This was not the only attempt ever made to educate Peter. Months afterwards, when Miss Calbraith had gone home and was busily writing her famous book, "Alone in Africa: by an English Gentlewoman," Sanders heard of another educative raid. Two members of an Ethiopian mission came into Isisi by the back way. The Ethiopian mission is made up of Christian black men, who, very properly, basing their creed upon Holy Writ, preach the gospel of Equality. A black man is as good as a white man any day of the week, and infinitely better on Sundays if he happens to be a member of the Reformed Ethiopian Church.
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