Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/360

 The man who ran the launch lives on the hotel farm, and says that since August last, crocodiles have captured twenty of the farm cattle. The cattle go to the river to drink, or to stand in the water during the heat of the day, and the crocodiles, some of which are eighteen feet long, drag them in. One of the soldiers from the camp near the hotel shot a crocodile while we were on the river I heard a curious discussion while we were eating luncheon on the island. An Englishman, a church member, had great respect for missionaries. All the others were residents of Africa, and their testimony was against them. One man said the superintendent of a penitentiary told him recently that ninety per cent of the convicts had been "converted" by missionaries. A mining man testified that negroes who had been under the influence of missionaries were nearly always less honest and less useful than natives who had had no such experience. A woman who lived on a South-African farm of 20,000 acres gave similar testimony, as did an army man who had served in Africa since the Boer war. Wherever I have gone, I have heard the missionary experiment denounced by white residents. I am taking no part in the controversy, but record as a remarkable fact that in Africa, China, Japan, India, etc., the testimony of white residents is nearly always against the missionary experiment. Every traveler remarks this, and comments on it This morning at 3 o'clock a rifle-shot rang out back of the hotel; one of the soldiers in the camp saw a leopard prowling around, and shot at it. A photographer living near the hotel has a cow, a calf and a donkey, and every night these are carefully