90 THE AFRICAN TRADER.

and grow rich, and many more people come, and
we not fear any of our enemies. All the people
were heathens, and prayed to the fetish.

After some time many people come from Sierra
Leone, who had been carried off in slavers, and
taken by the English cruisers, and landed there.
They find relations and friends in Abeokuta, and
so they stop to live with us. Some of them had
learned in Sierra Leone about God and His Son
Jesus Christ, and they tell us, and many of the
people of Abeokuta say they will no longer pray to
the fetish, but will only pray to God, and love Him
and serve Him. My fader was among these, and
now the only thing he cared for in life was to listen
to the missionaries and hear about Jesus Christ.
Only one thing: made him unhappy, that was that
my poor moder should not learn the truth of the
gospel. He knew that she was carried away by
bad people, and he afraid that she become bad like
them; but he pray day and night that God in His
mercy would make known to her His great love,
as He had made it known to him.

‘Oh, if I could but hear that she had become a
Christian how happy I should be!’ he used to say
to me over and over again. ‘ Paul,’ that was the