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-13-

Boys walking along beside us (our reserve hammock men) carried crude drums made of thick bamboo, and with chanting and drumbeating we made our way into our first native village. We stopped here to rest, to buy another water bucket, and to wait for our hammock frames, which eventually caught up with us.

A hammock frame is an arched wooden framework, covered with green cloth to shade the occupant of the hammock. A heavy board runs across the front and the back, and this rests on the heads of the four carriers. The hammock is swung from a crossbar, and although the frame adds thirty pounds to the weight of the contraption, the shade it gives is certainly welcome. As soon as we were all four riding in hammocks, we made good time, and reached Swagaju between four and five o'clock. The town chief assigned us a small mud house, and our 80 boys were quartered here and there about the village. Our little house had a small verandah where we set up our dining table and four folding chairs, a narrow central passageway, part of which we blocked off with a tarpaulin for a bathroom, and two small bedrooms, each with one window. Our cots and mosquito nets were set up, Charlie the cook opened two tins of corned beef and cabbage, and we were ready for our first night in camp.

This is Kpelle country, but it is known as Kpessi - a sort of slang expression apparently, like Limey or Wop. The village, of perhaps forty or fifty thatch-roofed, mud-walled huts, was bare of any trees or greenery - just clean-swept earth. Native dogs, small brown-haired animals, came to sniff at us, but were well-behaved and seemed to be better fed than they are in some [[strikethrough]]native[[\strikethrough]] other countries The women wore a strip of printed cloth tied about their waist and reaching just below the knees; many of them had daubed their faces with white clay; the children, both boys and girls, were naked except for an occasional string around the waist, or exceedingly scanty breech cloth. The men wore nondescript garments - shorts and a cotton undershirt, a loose robe of native cloth, a breech cloth and nothing else. Mothers carried their babies tied on their backs, or brought them in their arms to see the white folks eat. An admiring throng stood close to the verandah all through dinner, and we felt very much as a circus freak must feel the first few times he sits on a platform to be stared at.

Most of our boys are KPessi, but Charlie the cook and Johnny the steward are Bassa. Word was passed around that the country devil was traveling our way, and Charlie and Johnny, as foreigners, were afraid to stick their noses out of the house, and slept huddled up in our tiny kitchen. The country devil did not appear.

After Flitting our bedroom thoroughly, and having a few large spiders killed, we slept in our little mud house very comfortably.

March 20 - 

Up at 5.30, just as dawn was breaking; dressed by the light of a kerosene lantern, and breakfasted. As the boxes and trunks were packed and locked, they were taken out in front of the house, and each man was supposed to come forward and pick up his load. But the shouting and confusion that arose over this apparently simple routine was indescribable. Everybody thought that the other fellow's load was lighter than his, or else that the load he carried yesterday had in some manner been made heavier than it had been, and the ensuing

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