Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/109

Rh I ever heard of. Perhaps some one will write an idyllic poem on the subject one day. I trust the Bishop was not engaged in the undignified amusement of “pulling my leg.”

I ask most irritating questions at times, ones that require a definite answer. This is not nice of me, I know but then, you see, I want to know. How do they convert the natives—that is the object of the Mission, I suppose? They “adopt” as many small children as possible, educate them, and teach them agriculture and what they can, and when of age marry them, help to start them in villages with cocoanut trees, a house, cattle, etc. They are obliged to teach these children to read and write German.

Now and again when I hear much laudatory talk over German colonisation the devil prompts me to say, “How much do you pay for a child there?” or How much for a girl?”—not that I mean to buy many to take home with me.

This Frenchman is quite a power amongst the Germans, and they treat him with much deference. They hold their breath as they wonderingly retail how he has introduced electric light at his Mission, and about his brewery and wood-sawing. They had not thought of such things themselves.

Germans are never more flattered than when a Frenchman condescends to them. They cherish a sort of hereditary idea that the French are a distinguished, high-bred, cultured, elegant race. In the Franco-Prussian War they gave France a tremendous beating, one she has never recovered from; their Prussian king was proclaimed German Emperor in the historic halls of Versailles, and the German kings and princes bent before him in homage. Would it be strange if Germany showed symptoms of “swelled head”? Yet for long it was not so. In the German character is a strange