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A little boy’s first article of clothing may be made of different coloured beads carefully woven into a square patch, which he wears hanging down before him from a string of beads encircling his waist. Or it may perhaps be only the skin of a small animal worn in the same way as the square of beads. He may, however, begin with a cloth from the beginning. If so his mother provides him with a yard of calico, rolls it round him, and sends him out into the world as proud as a white boy with his first pair of trousers.

He gets no special food because he is a child. He eats whatever is going and whatever he can lay his hands upon. Thus he grows up not unlike a little animal. There is not much trouble taken with him. If he lives, he lives; and if he dies—well, he is buried. No fond lips have bent over him and kissed him asleep, for kissing is not known to his people. Nor has he learned to lisp the name of Jesus at his mother’s knee. It is not that his mother does not love him, for she does in her own peculiar way. But all are shrouded in ignorance, father, mother and children, all held in the grip of dark superstitions from which nothing but the light of the Gospel of Love can free them.